


two ships passing

by pyrites



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: (They're both transfem!), Alternate Universe - Childhood Friends, Autistic Jon Sims, BPD Tim, Bisexual Character, Cane user Jon, Character Study, Disabled Character, Dissociative Gerry, Dissociative Jon, Drug Addiction, EDS Gerry, EDS Jon, Fix-It, Fluff and Humor, Gen, HoH Tim, Hopeful Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Indian Jon, Intense and gratuitously frustrating dramatic irony, Jewish Jon, Jon's Dadima Does Her Best, M/M, Mary Keay's A+ Parenting, Minor Jonathan Sims/Tim Stoker, Nonbinary Jon, OCD Jon, Original Character(s), POTS Gerry, Past Georgie Barker/Jonathan Sims, People with similar life experience gravitate towards each other ALRIGHT., Pining, Recovery, Reunions, Service Dogs, Slow Burn, Trans Gerry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-09
Updated: 2020-09-16
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:07:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 17
Words: 146,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22189123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pyrites/pseuds/pyrites
Summary: Gerard Keay is 10 years old the very first time he tries to run away from home, right around the time that Jonathan Sims has just come into possession of his first Leitner.Or: One dropped stone can change the way the whole ocean moves.
Relationships: Gerard Keay & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Gerard Keay/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist/Tim Stoker
Comments: 2092
Kudos: 1304
Collections: GerryTitan verse





	1. get underway

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ren @[titanfalling](http://titanfalling.tumblr.com/) and i are menaces but at the end of the day THAT'S MY _ANCHOR!_ and also an incredible beta reader, so big thanks to them for helping me clean this up!

_get underway - to begin a journey_

───── ☆ ─────

The shade underneath the open metal slide is cooler than the breeze. Gerard couldn’t have chosen a more peaceful place to sit down and close his eyes.

The wood chips underneath him aren’t the softest thing to rest on, but so long as he stays perfectly still they don’t cut into his legs with their edges. His rucksack smells like his room at home.

But if he closes his eyes, all he hears is the park. The sweet chirrup of birds that haven’t ever felt the isolation of captivity. The laughter of children younger than him, playing with their affectionate parents nearby. If they fall down, they’re scooped up with laughter and kisses. If they run off, they’re followed out of love. 

It's almost enough. Gerard is on the edge of falling asleep.

He doesn’t quite know how long he’d traveled to get here since leaving the bookshop. The city’s sign had said _Bournemouth_ when he passed it walking from the train station. Gerard has no real idea of where that is on a map, but at least it isn’t London. He’d stolen enough money from mum to buy a one-way ticket on the train from Waterloo and had taken it as far as it would go before his body itched to move, which was evidently only about two and a half hours worth of a ride.

He itched at the looks from other passengers, so visibly wondering where his guardians were. Creating scenarios in their heads to explain his presence in a way that isn’t uncomfortable, perhaps hoping he’d been placed on this train by someone who loved him and was headed to the house of an equally as pleasant relative for the spring season. Or perhaps, due to his carrying only one rucksack, he had already been on a short trip and was going back home. Maybe that would justify imagining him being entrusted with too much responsibility at such a young, gangly age.

Given his disposition it shouldn’t have been hard to believe. He’d sat quietly in the window seat, his temple leaned upon the glass, and said nothing. He kept his bag on his lap and didn’t put his feet up on the seat opposite of him, even when his ankle got sore. He’d behaved himself, and met eyes with no one. The rumble of the train as it moved was more comforting to him than every sick, foreign-world lullaby his mum had ever crooned in his ear.

The conductor had come around to collect all the tickets and nearly recoiled when she reached out a hand to accept one from a boy no more than ten years old, and without a guardian. He had kept his ticket raised in obedient offering, waiting for it to be punched and returned to him. The conductor had verbalized what he assumed everyone around him was thinking and asked if he was on his way to stay with family living southern seaside. For lack of a truthful answer, he had nodded.

He may ache for someone to notice but he wants it to come without needing to explain.

Mum sleeps in the wee hours, thriving in her way at night. Gerard knows when she’s asleep because she’s always down when he wakes up to catch the school bus, and watch it drive past. He often wondered what would happen if he walked to the stop near his house and stowed away, pretended to be a new student. That his coming back to London from one of their trips was just him moving here for the first time. He knows he wouldn’t get far, but it’d be nice to sit in on a class about history that mum doesn’t touch on in her lessons at home. Maybe he could at least talk to someone his age before he was caught.

When it came time to he stared at maps and schedules, rapidly flicking through names of cities and towns he only somewhat recognized. They made him dizzy after a while. When he'd had enough and went to purchase his ticket from the window, he simply chose one that he knew would bring him towards the ocean.

This park is the first place he’d seen fit to sit down. He plopped down onto the ground against some thick, knotted rope bridge and pulled from his rucksack one of the three peanut butter sandwiches he’d fixed himself in a hurry at the crack of dawn. It was oddly dry in his mouth but he would take it. He’d eaten the first half on the train. Can’t go through them too fast.

After that, he made it his mission to try every little piece of the playground area; slides, swings, monkey bars. None of it was all that captivating, but he did it anyway.

Swinging is the best of it — wind on his face, momentary weightlessness — but after a little while, his legs got too tired to keep himself moving. He let himself go limp, heels of his trainers dragging in the concave of packed dirt underneath him until he skidded and twisted to an anticlimactic stop. He let his arms fall to his sides, leaning the joint of his shoulder into the chain.

It was cold against his ear. He relished in the sharp feeling. It wasn’t quick and loud like a slap in the face, or the whole-handed caress of a dishonest apology. It just reminded him of where he was.

Eventually a few other kids flocked to the swings next to him. One girl dawdled back, left out. Wordlessly, he stood up to make room for her and find someplace else to sit. She perked up immediately with a toothy grin and all but skipped over to take his place. He reached for the strap of his rucksack where he had left it against one of the swingset’s poles and slung it back over his shoulder, scanning for an empty space.

The shade under the playground beckoned him in whispers. Aside from the group who had commandeered the swings and a few other errant parents with their toddlers, there’s hardly a crowd to speak of. He had put his rucksack in his lap and hugged his arms around it, resting his head down and closing his eyes, and lost track of time.

He looks up when he hears a body hit the ground.

It doesn’t make a wet noise or even all that heavy of a thud. There is no sound of screaming or blades being pulled or blood squirting through an opening in something that shouldn’t be there.

Just another kid on his knees in the wood chips.

He’s small, far smaller than even Gerard himself is. He’s feeling around on the ground for something — a pair of glasses that lie discarded not too far from his reaching hands, but far too close to the ruddy trainers of the person standing over him.

The person could be better described as a young man. He’s much too tall, much too old to be standing over a kid that size in any such threatening manner. His posture almost implies that he’s trying to decide between stepping on the glasses or kicking the small boy right in the stomach, but then he freezes.

In his hands is a book. There’s a look in his eyes, a _hunger,_ that Gerard recognizes.

It takes Gerard a moment to recognize the pain in his own stomach. Dread, it feels like. Like that cold, slimy stone that mum had had him fish out of their own sink after she let it drop from the pages of some terrible tome that he didn’t understand the writing in, the water black and murky. 

The weight of it had started to grow in his hands once he touched it, as if the slime had cemented him to it like waxy glue. It never even hardened. Just stuck. He couldn’t let it go, and the more he tried to wrench himself away, the further it sank.

It had pulled him in, then, to a depth far beyond that of any normal bathroom sink. He had cried out for help before his head went underwater — not to his mum, no, she had left the room — and he had hung folded over the edge of the sink, kicking his legs and knocking his knees against the cabinets, until she finally walked back in.

He doesn’t know how she got him out, or even why, but he came back to himself in a puddle of water and with a stomach ache from bending over the porcelain. Wiping his face free of black water and tears was out of the question; his hands continued to feel unclean for weeks.

No amount of scrubbing had helped. Remembering it now, he clenches his fists to will away the phantom muck, the push of cold otherworldly substance between his fingers.

The feeling in his stomach now is a lot like that. Like a lumpy boulder in his belly with no right way to have gotten there. A mountain inverted, dragging him down into the watery, black sky.

No. No, it can’t be one of those. He’d been running _away_ for a _reason._

Just as quickly as that sinking-dreadstone feeling had come and gone, some part of him wonders suddenly if this was planned. If maybe, somehow, mum had only left enough money in plain view for a one-way ticket from Waterloo station to Bournemouth, because she knew what he might find there. If she had done _what she did_ to drive him away specifically when she did it because she knew he had to be the one to sit in this park and see with his own eyes what running away could never spare him from. Spare anyone from.

Someone will die if he stays put. If he doesn’t do something. He could die if he does, but that’s no contest.

So Gerard rises from the shadow of the slide. He starts to roll up his sleeves as if readying his hands for dirty work. He has no way of knowing just how dirty it will become, but there are two things he does know.

One: He would be a terrible person if he let those glasses get crunched under that shoe like an insect. Let that kid get kicked like a sack of unimportant meat.

Two: He can’t let that book out of his sight.

The young man appears none the wiser as Gerard stomps up to him until the very moment he makes a bold reach for the book. The bastard had been so engrossed in it that he actually loses his grip and it falls to the ground.

Gerard can see now what it looks like; the fat, ugly spider on the cover and the stupid little hat it wears. The innocence of the little hat is such a lie that it could make him laugh if he weren’t so furious at the book’s very existence.

They both dive for it. Gerard’s cheekbone catches a hard elbow as penance. It seems more accidental than anything but still he twists with the impact, blinded for a moment with pain. The backs of his knees catch the shape of the previously fallen boy, who had been scrambling back and away in silent panic, and he nearly falls.

Nearly, until the sole of a shoe flattens itself against his ribs and gives a solid shove. Gerard lets himself roll with the momentum now, reluctant to push back.

Maybe it would have been smarter to leave his sleeves down. The wood chips are sharp against his elbows when he hits the ground, too.

It doesn’t matter. If he can just grab the _book—_

But the thief starts to walk away with it, like all urgency had left him the moment it was back in his hands. Like he might not have even bothered getting physical if it hadn’t been taken from him. Gerard wouldn’t consider himself so foolish as to believe he never would have gotten physical with kids at _all_ were this book not involved, but for a moment it had been as if he had forgotten that the people he was fighting for it were children half his size.

It’s like he’s in the same kind of trance that Gerard had found himself in when he got off the train and started drifting down streets whose names escape him now, turning random corners as if he would find himself a new and better home over the water. A sleepwalker’s dream of waking up somewhere more fulfilling.

For a moment all Gerard can do is watch him go. His desperation wavers. He avoids moving his fingers, keenly aware of the wood chips stuck to his hands and the splinters that have most certainly already taken refuge in the skin of his palms. His cheek hurts, his elbows, his tailbone.

When he does move, it’s to turn and face the other boy. He’s just sitting there, too, his narrow face drawn in shock as he watches the man walk away. He hasn’t picked up his glasses yet, so Gerard reaches out for them. He holds them out in offering, and the boy numbly accepts them.

“You alright?” is the first thing he mumbles out. His voice sticks to the inside of his throat like it had grown mould after so long without using it, despite the last time he had spoken being the previous night, practicing wonky prayers at mum’s side.

The boy finally turns to stare at him with those owlish eyes, still uncovered by the glasses held so limply in his hands. The first words out of his mouth are, “I need my book back.”

Gerard stares at him. The words are hollowed out and all the more strongly said for it. He must have read a few pages before it was taken from him.

Well, Gerard hadn’t. He’d only caught a glimpse of the cover. It held nothing over him.

When the boy starts to stand up, his eyes trained on the back of the retreating thief once again, Gerard reaches out a hand to stop him. His eyes drop down to the boy’s arms, catching the silvery glint of something hanging off of the fabric of his sleeves. Like long, loose hairs, limp and slipping as if cut from a spool. 

He thinks of the spider on the cover of the book and fights another wave of ill in his stomach. He swats the severed strands away, and they don’t seem to hit the ground.

“I’ll get it. You stay.”

He doesn’t wait again for an answer. He doesn’t have a plan of any kind, but he knows he has to go. Not even that mum would want him to, but that he needs to stop something terrible from happening. 

Whether something awful happens to that guy or not — he’d been throwing children to the ground, for g-d’s sake, Gerard won’t forget that — once the book leaves his hands, it’ll find someone else’s. 

That’s what Gerard needs to put a stop to. He doesn’t know how, doesn’t even know why; it’s the precise opposite of what mum would want from him.

Maybe that’s the reason. Maybe he doesn’t want this to have been orchestrated. By her or anyone else.

He starts to stand up, doesn’t bother to brush the wood chips off of his trousers, and starts towards where the young man had taken off. He can see him; even walking so slowly with his face buried in that book, he’s managed to get far enough ahead that Gerard has to jog to catch up.

When they reach a corner, Gerard slows down, creeping along the wall. He stands no chance at tackling the guy, but maybe he can rush past him and grab the thing out of his hands in one go. Maybe he can outrun him, and get out.

It’s starting to get dark. How long had he been half asleep under the slide? 

It’s when he rounds the next corner to the line of dim houses that he realizes the other kid had followed him anyway. He spares him only a quick glance, gritting his teeth in his mouth. No one ever listens.

Gerard doesn’t say as much. It isn’t important now; he’s been involved from the beginning. Technically, Gerard was the one sticking his nose where it didn’t belong. 

There’s no forcing the other boy away. Any whispering that either of them starts up could get them seen, be it by the man with the book or by whatever is lurking in wait for him. For all of them, if Gerard is too slow.

For a moment he wonders if it’s selfish to be glad he isn’t alone.

When the thief starts to approach a house, Gerard slows down even more. He doesn’t realize that he had stuck both of his arms out at either side until he feels the soft jumper of the other kid bump his sore right elbow. He feels keenly the squeeze of small fingers wrapping around his forearm. He watches the darkness shine off of strings of silvergrey wrapped in bracelets around the limbs of the wandering thief, and allows the boy behind him to hold onto him.

The ritual knocking begins, and Gerard doesn’t wait to see what it is being summoned. Not the full scope of it, anyway. The quick flash of long, hairy legs is enough.

Somehow, he’d gotten both of his arms around the other kid’s middle before taking off running, clumsily half-dragging him away. The kid is scrawnier than he is and lifts all too easily. Probably because he tucks his legs up to curl up like a pillbug, clinging tightly to Gerard’s arm now with both of his.

Unfortunately, a ten-year-old can only run with another child in his arms for so far. He only reaches the second street corner over before he has to put the other boy down, stumbling over a shoelace he can’t remember letting fall loose. His right ankle screams at him, the sharp pain of thorn grinding against bone shooting up the length of his leg. He catches himself with a scraped elbow on the side of the wooden fence next to them and hisses, silencing himself when he catches the sound of a whimper fall from his own trembling mouth.

He stares at the sidewalk in front of him for a moment, eyes wide. How long had his hearing been this warped? He doesn’t want to cradle his elbow, he knows his hands are grimy and it’d only hurt more. He needs to pull himself together. Best he can do is straighten up and let out a big breath, and look to the other kid.

The boy looks like he’s seen a ghost, which would be markedly better than what he actually did just see. 

Gerard can’t think of what to say to him just yet. He’d expected him to have run away by now, but he doesn’t move. Just stands there with his shirt half-untucked and his glasses askew — they’d cracked, Gerard can’t tell when that had happened — and it takes a long time for his eyes to come back into focus.

When they do, they land on Gerard’s arms. After that, he reaches out for his wrist.

“Come on,” he says as he starts walking.

Gerard doesn’t think to ask where they’re going now. Apparently he’d done enough leading them around for the evening. It’s his turn, now, to be led.

Only when they come upon the silhouette of the playground does he remember that he’d left his rucksack under the slide. He needs that if he’s going to be going anywhere; it has all of his clothes in it, and his peanut butter sandwiches. His notebook, and his torch, and what’s left of his money.

The boy doesn’t argue when he starts to pull away and limp back towards the park, only makes a questioning little noise in the back of his throat like he doesn’t understand why he would want to go back there. Still, he follows close behind. He must not want to be left alone, either.

The rucksack hadn’t been stolen. Gerard allows himself a momentary gladness at that, slinging it over his shoulder with relief. When he faces the boy again, without really knowing why, he sticks out his arm again in offering. The boy takes it.

For a while, neither of them say a word. Gerard knows his own reason for that; there’s nothing to say. He can’t speak for the other boy, though. He’s probably still just scared. 

When the boy finds his voice again, it’s to tell Gerard, “My first aid kit is under the sink. We need to clean up your cuts and put disinfectant on them.” 

The words come out over-enunciated — _dis-in-fect-ant_ — like he’s practiced his pronunciation in preparation for the day that he would need to say them to someone else. 

Gerard doesn’t think he really needs first aid, even though it hurts. A tweezer would be nice for the splinters, though.

He lets this other kid do whatever he thinks he has to do. It must be important to him to feel like he gets to decide what happens next. Gerard owes that to him, he thinks, considering what he had led him to witness.

The house is bigger than his mum’s narrow flat. Too big considering how empty it is; the darkened windows say that no one else is home. The boy reaches around in a potted plant on the porch for a house key and opens the door to reveal a neat openness that Gerard immediately envies. He studies the floating shelves on the walls, the muted paintings and picture frames, absently walking forward until the boy stops him with both hands on his chest.

“No shoes in the house,” he says, pointing past Gerard to indicate the mat by the door. “Go put them there.”

Gerard falters, but obeys. It makes him nervous for some reason, leaving something of his in a room he won’t stay in. The boy nods in approval before he starts walking again, his thin fingers circled around Gerard’s wrist.

When they pass a room lined with bookshelves, the envy quickly dies.

The boy drags him into a spotless bathroom and flicks on the lightswitch. Gerard squints against the light, keeps his head down. Still, he catches a glimpse of his reflection in the mirror. There’s a small bruise starting to take root in the flesh of his cheek, a growing purple-red in the harsh, new brightness.

It hardly makes a difference. There are worse on the rest of him.

His rucksack hits the ground with a thud when he drops it. The boy has crouched to open the cabinet under the sink, rifling around for a sizable red box to set on the counter. He can hardly reach into it once he does, he’s so short.

Gerard doesn’t intervene again, though. Only watches as he fishes out what he thinks he needs, which turns out to be the promised disinfectant and a worn out box of plasters with Winnie the Pooh characters on them. The box of plasters is nearly empty. Gerard eyes them for a long moment, wondering at how long he’s had it. In the light now, he can see that the boy already has about three on his own hands, a purple one with Eeyore on it all but wrinkling off of his right middle finger.

The boy glances between Gerard’s arms and the plasters he had dumped into his hand, his mouth poked into a thoughtful pout. He seems to decide that he needs three more, and so empties the box onto the counter to create a small pile.

Gerard helps by sticking his elbow under the running faucet and staying still while the other boy pats at his wounds with a clean washrag. He does his best not to complain when the sting of disinfectant lances through his arms, ducking his head to shy away from the truth of how uncomfortable it is.

The boy places the colourful cartoon plasters over the scrapes with steady hands. Gerard counts how many whole honey pots decorate the one on his elbow before they become halves and quarters.

“That was dumb,” the kid says eventually. “I would have been fine.”

Gerard looks at him, both brows raised. Yeah, okay. Is he forgetting the giant legs that had swept that other guy through the door, surely never to be seen again lest someone find a spat out set of bones?

Maybe it’s the shock. Sometimes being scared can make you go numb; Gerard knows. He knows it doesn't last forever. The kid’s hands had been steady when he was placing the bandages but now that he’s reclaimed them to cross his arms, Gerard can see his very outline shaking.

Or maybe he’s just talking about the first part. The part where he’d been knocked to the ground for no good reason before anything creepy crawly came into it. Maybe he wants to rewind and get back to that part, the part that he’s probably been through before. The part he almost definitely used up cartoonish plasters over.

Either way, there’s really only one thing Gerard can say to that.

“Better do something dumb than do nothing at all.”

At this, the kid looks suitably stunned. He fidgets and glances away, his eyes fluttering around the room like a nervous bird — he kind of reminds Gerard of a bird right now, the way he moves — and so Gerard continues staying still. He remembers the time he’d gotten a pigeon to eat a piece of a sandwich he’d left on the ground very close to his shoes once by doing that, not close enough to reach out and pet it but enough that it didn’t fear him.

“W-Well, thank you, um. For helping.”

Gerard nods. When the kid frowns down at his shoes, Gerard realizes just how heavily he’s distributing his weight onto his left side. He hadn’t noticed that he’s hardly let his foot touch the ground since getting comfortable leaning against the sink.

“Did you hurt your leg running?”

“No,” Gerard mumbles.

“Okay, so did you hurt it before?”

Gerard’s lips pinch. “It’s old. Don’t worry about it.”

The kid wipes his hands on the sides of his trousers, glancing about the room still as if the random items scattered about will tell him what to say next. The way he fidgets makes Gerard think for a moment that maybe he’s not doing so badly at this whole meeting new people thing himself, but he second guesses that when the boy finally gives his name.

“I’m Jon?” he says, like he’s double-checking to be sure. “Jon Sims.”

He holds his hand out to Gerard for a shake, his fingers rigidly stacked together, so stiff that they curve back a bit.

How is Gerard supposed to introduce himself? Is it _John_ by itself, or _Jon,_ short for Jonathan? If it’s a nickname, maybe Gerard can give one, too. He debates this as he stares down at Jon’s outstretched hand, otherwise motionless, until he comes to the decision to simply say what he knows. 

“Gerard.”

By the time he has the sense to reach out and actually complete the handshake, though, Jon’s arm has withdrawn to curl across his stomach again. Better this way, probably. Gerard had never asked for a tweezer.

“Well, Gerard,” Jon starts to announce in this voice that says he’s still trying to sound grown up. “You’ll probably be wanting to get home soon. It’s dark out.”

Gerard has no answer for that. He watches the tile floor by his feet, quiet.

He sees Jon tip his head to the side through the corner of his eye.

“Where do you live?” he tries. “I… I can walk you there, or we can wait for my dadima to come home. She can drive you.”

Gerard’s brow creases. “Who?”

Jon bounces to straighten up, suddenly excited. “My grandmother! _Daa-dee-ma.”_ He taps his chin for a moment, thoughtful. “You should just call her _dadi_ if you meet her, since it still means _granny,_ sort of, but you’re not her _grandchild_. It’s important to respect your elders.”

Dadi. _Daa-dee._ Okay.

Gerard doubts he’ll ever call anyone by name in this house, but he can’t risk saying the wrong thing. It’s important to respect your elders here. He doesn’t want to know what will happen if he makes a mistake. Better to be seen and not heard.

“So… what do you want to do?” Jon asks. “Walk home, or wait for dadima?”

Gerard shrugs. Jon shuffles where he stands, discomfited.

“Well, what does that mean? I can’t help you if you don’t talk.”

“I don’t need help,” Gerard says. “I’m— I’m here on my own.”

Jon steps back a little. Gerard feels his face heat up with embarrassment. He wishes his hair was longer so that he could hide behind it like a curtain. 

“...Why, though? Where are your parents?”

“Where are yours?”

The way Jon goes slack in the shoulders now makes Gerard rethink his tone. How had that come out sounding? He lowers his head again, this time apologetic, but provides no answer of his own.

He hadn’t wanted to tell the conductor on the train, and he doesn’t want to tell Jon or his dadi. He doesn’t want to be sent back to London, or have anyone call his mum.

“Where are you supposed to go, then?” Jon asks, recovered.

Gerard shrugs again. “I can find somewhere, I bet.”

Jon’s face screws up like he’s just smelled something foul. The cross of his arms becomes resolute. “That’s _hardly_ practical. You’ll just have to stay here.”

Gerard’s eyes go big in his head. “What?”

Jon clutches at the sleeves of his jumper. “That… that _thing,_ it’s still out there. I can’t let you go outside by yourself. Besides, we— we should stick together.”

The determination in Jon’s statement fizzles into bashful uncertainty by the time he declares what he thinks they should be doing, a mumbling whisper directed at the floor. It’s as if he can’t decide whether he wants to be brave or wrestle it back down under the lid of a box in the back of his mind. Gerard can see the limbo dancing across his face, in how he tries in short bursts to hold strong eye contact before something cracks.

Gerard doesn’t know what sticking together will do for their situation, but he’s hardly in any place to argue. He really has no clue where he would go if he were to leave here right now.

This house, however big and unfamiliar, is warm and the door was locked with a very safe sounding _click_ when Jon had turned the latch behind them. Even the room with the bookshelves that had struck a sense of renewed dread into Gerard’s heart hadn’t actually given off an air of danger. They were probably just normal books.

Gerard doesn’t quite recall how long he’s been silent by the time he finally nods his agreement. Jon takes it as it is, and starts cleaning up the first aid kit. Gerard turns to look at himself in the mirror again, counting now the bright splotches of colour stuck to his arms. Jon had put more plasters on him than he needed.

It’s a surge of tenderness in his hand that shakes him out of his head. He had reached out to grab onto the counter and froze, frowning down at his palm. Some part of him finally grasps onto the sense he needs to reach for the faucet handle and turn on the water to stiffly rinse his hands.

“What’s wrong?” Jon asks, peering over. 

“Splinters,” Gerard says simply. The word comes out sounding like one.

Jon starts to dig through the box again, the sound of bottles and boxes clunking into each other filling the room. He pulls out a small metal instrument and reaches again for Gerard’s wrist, pulling his hand over the basin of the sink and squinting down at it. He doesn’t bring the tweezers to his palm, hesitating.

“I can’t see anything.”

“I can feel them,” Gerard supplies. It feels like if he were to close his fists one more time, he’d only drive them deeper.

“Dadima can help,” Jon says. “I-I have to tell her you’re here anyway. She just doesn’t come home ‘til late sometimes.”

Gerard gives a quiet hum. He doesn’t quite know what that bit of information explains, but it does.

“Will you be okay ‘til she comes back?” Jon asks him. Gerard takes the hand towel he’s offering him, nodding again. Jon keeps the tweezers out on the counter while he puts the first aid kit back under the sink, grabbing them to drop into his pocket when he straightens up again.

“Tonight was bingo night.” He squeezes past Gerard and back out into the hallway, turning around to wait for him. “She wins a lot, so she lets me have the prizes as long as they're appropriate for my age. If it’s sweets again, you can have some.”

Gerard loops his arm through the strap of his rucksack without grabbing it by hand, shrugging it on to follow Jon wherever he’s headed. Jon leads him across to the kitchen and drags a tall chair over to one of the counters. Gerard leans on the back of another chair and watches as Jon proceeds to use his to climb up onto the counter, and start rifling through cabinets.

“We don’t keep too many snacks,” Jon informs him. “But I can make sandwiches until dadima makes dinner. I’m hungry.” 

The way he says it implies that he assumes Gerard is, too. Dumbly, Gerard speaks up to protest.

“I have sandwiches.”

Jon turns around to face him, dropping his hands onto his knees. “You do? What kind?”

“Peanut butter. S’two in my bag.”

Jon swivels to get his legs out from underneath him and sit on the counter properly, feet dangling off the edge. “Want to have those now and dadima will make something better later?”

Gerard answers by swinging his rucksack up onto the high table, carefully pinching the zipper between two fingers to pull it open. The sandwich bags are a bit crushed against the front of the rucksack, the bread flattened into creases and some of the peanut butter squishing out of one of them into a corner. Gerard takes the messier of the two and places the other in front of where Jon is setting the chair back up before he climbs onto it again, this time to sit.

They eat quietly but for the crinkle of plastic, until Jon decides that these sandwiches are too dry to have without milk and announces so rather loudly, jumping down from his chair with a thunk. Gerard watches him bustle around and decides that he’s definitely scared out of his wits. It shows in the way he busies himself with literally everything _but_ questioning what he’d seen today, and whether he’ll ever see it again.

He can’t have forgotten it so quickly. He can’t be this good at choosing between his own thoughts. For all of his attempts at sounding grown up, he’s clearly a few years younger than Gerard and had probably, hopefully, been leading a relatively normal life until this afternoon.

Gerard’s envy returns and dies all over again in quick succession. Jon’s life isn’t normal anymore. Not tonight, it isn’t. Not for as long as Gerard darkens his doorstep, sits at his table and gives him squished peanut butter sandwiches from inside his runaway bag. 

Maybe it could be normal again after he leaves. With the added bonus of no longer being beaten up by book thieves in parks.

Gerard doesn’t realize he’s nodding off at the table until Jon shakes his arm. He’d drooped forward in his seat, the last dredges of his sandwich still held between his fingertips. He hears Jon say, “You can’t sleep _here,”_ and feels a tug on his arm, so he obediently slides off of his chair to wobble to his feet. He leaves his sandwich on top of the plastic bag, his rucksack still open on the table.

The trip from kitchen to couch is a blur. It’s a big, soft, olive-coloured couch with lace doilies on it and everything. Gerard sits down heavily on the center cushion and sinks backwards, turning his head to watch Jon tromp back towards the kitchen to gather up their plastic bags and throw them out. There go his provisions, wasted all in one go.

As Jon places their empty glasses in the kitchen sink, Gerard slowly teeters sideways. He hasn’t kicked his shoes off yet, so he doesn’t pull his feet up onto the cushions. His hands are still smarting, so he does his best not to fold them underneath himself when he gives in and curls up around a nearby pillow.

He doesn’t know when he got so tired all of a sudden, or why he’s not trying harder to fight it. This house is warm and the front door is locked and he’s not all by himself. Maybe that’s it. He might not go so far as to say he feels safe, but as far as he can tell, there are no evil books left in Jon’s possession and the beast they had encountered has already been fed tonight.

Sleep prickles at him like itchy grass on a dry summer day. Some very persistent, very dark space in the back of his mind tries to liken it to hairy, gargantuan spider legs; the part of him that _can’t_ ignore what he’s hiding in this house from. What he’s content to let Jon think is the _only_ thing he’s hiding from.

It’s the same part that knows how disappointed, furious, _hateful_ his mum would be if she knew — _will_ be when he surely has to face her. When she sees the nightmare written on his face before he has the chance to try and burn the page.

But she isn’t here. The only pieces of her that have entered this place are inside Gerard’s head, and he refuses to let them out. Not so soon.

He won’t let himself look down at the pillow under his head and see it seeping with ink like a bloody gunshot, a liquefied headache poured out of his ear to poison the room. He won’t turn his head to see her standing over him, or worse, her silhouette in the doorway outlined by sinister candlelight. He refuses.

Instead he’ll close his eyes and think of what it might mean to be left peacefully on the couch in a house that is not his, while his host tarries on in the kitchen. Like it isn’t a problem that he’s in here alone. Like he’s being trusted not to ruin anything.

Mum isn’t here. No one is here but someone who had run from the monster, too, and lived. Someone who is directly responsible for running the tap in a sink that is not full of darkness and slimy stones and memories of drowning. Just swishing water in tall glasses and emptying them out enough times for Gerard to count the soft splashes from the other room. Unhurried. Killing time.

He drifts off thinking that maybe this is as close as “safe” gets.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> gerry, dissociating: what does this kid think he's doing, _dissociating?_ unrealistic. *falls asleep*
> 
> next part will be in jon's perspective! he's been compartmentalizing as best he can, but trauma is messy. tune in next time to see gerry receiving basic care from an actual adult! **wrow.**
> 
> i'm on tumblr @[gerrydelano](http://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/)!
> 
> also, heads up to new readers: this fic only becomes shippy in ADULTHOOD for them; there is no weird obsessive childhood crush that transcends time, cross my heart. i don't play like that. mostly, this is a study in recovery from deeply rooted trauma and the pursuit of connection through deliberate effort. woo!
> 
> _[chapter 15 edited on 7/31/2020, added HoH (hard of hearing) tim]_
> 
> _[edited on 8/27/2020; added a section to chapter 1 discussing what jon calls his grandmother; persistent change throughout the entire fic! currently in progress.]_


	2. all at sea

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “As long as you’re… watching out for _me,_ ” Gerry says, slowly, like the concept only exists in another language, “I’ll watch out for you. Nothing is going to get you while I’m here.”
> 
> Jon finds himself nodding frantically. “You, too. Me, too. We’ll— We’ll keep each other safe. Right?”
> 
> “Right.”

_all at sea - a state of confusion or disorder_

───── ☆ ─────

When Gerard falls asleep on the couch, that’s when Jon starts to panic.

He has nothing to do now. No scrapes to put plasters on and no one who needs him to pour milk into a glass for them, no one who needs his nervous chatter to fill the air. He has nothing to do now, and too much to think about.

For too long a while he just stands there some distance from the couch and stares. He wrings his hands, the plaster around his middle finger, loose from constant flexing and sweat, finally falling off into his opposite palm. He squeezes it tightly, for the life of him unable to cross over to the waste bin and throw it out just yet.

The mousy, pale brown of Gerard’s hair falls across his forehead like sawdust. Jon wishes he’d gotten him something for the bruise on his cheek. There’s a frozen bag of carrots in the freezer that he could have offered to him wrapped in a towel, but he’d forgotten. There had been too many things buzzing around in his head for him to remember that when your skin gets swollen and purple like that, you ought to put something cold on it.

Dadima should have been home half an hour ago. He’d seen the clock on the wall and remembered she had said she would be back by 8:00 at the latest. Usually when this happens, it’s because she went and grabbed something to eat with her friends and she brings him something back in a takeaway box. There’s always a dessert with it when she does; a slice of plain cheesecake (the only kind he likes) or a maple blondie with the special sauce in a separate container. Something to make up for leaving him alone.

But what if she just doesn’t come home? 

What if, when walking to her car from the bingo hall, something leaped out of the shadows to attack her? What if _A Guest For Mr. Spider_ found its way back to her and was sitting on her windshield like it was waiting? What if she opened it then, and drove right up to that house? What if, after it took her, the creature skulked out into the night and came back for him? What if, because Gerard had been with him when it ate— when it— 

What if it took _him,_ too? The first person Jon has ever invited over to his house to stay the night, and he’d just get him eaten. Wonderful.

The doorknob jiggles and Jon gasps like a fire starting. Some part of him wants to hide behind the arm of the couch, to wake Gerard up and have him hide, too, before he hears the knob turn, the rustle of plastic, and the click of high heels on the foyer floor.

“Jon?” Exasperation tints dadima’s voice. _“Why_ are all the lights on?”

Now his instinct is to run to her, and so he does. He trips a bit but he makes it, careening around the corner and running straight into her legs with a soft crash. She stumbles backwards a bit into the door, the plastic bags on her arms knocking into one another, and she starts to say something in complaint before she seems to register how hard he’s clinging to her waist. One of her hands comes down to rest on the back of his head.

“Jon, what is it?” she asks. Her voice has softened, just so. “Has something happened? And what on earth have you done to your glasses?”

Jon realizes now that there’s a hairline crack running through his right lens. Oh.

“I—” His voice trips over what feels like gravel caught in his throat. He reaches up to scrub at his eyes underneath his glasses with his fingertips. “I fell at the park.”

“On your _face?”_ Dadima _tuts_ and ushers him towards the kitchen with a hand at his shoulder, presumably to check him for injuries in brighter light. Quickly, Jon turns to stick his arms out and stop her by the stomach.

“Wait! There’s—” Jon straightens up, raising his chin to look up at her. “I have someone over. A-A friend!” 

Alarm twitches on dadima’s face. She immediately lifts her head to look over the top of his, craning sideways to peer past the wall that separates them from the living room. Jon can tell by the way that she blinks a few times that she can probably see the peculiar shape on the couch from here.

“Jon, you need to _tell me_ when you’re going to have someone over,” she whispers. _“Before_ they’re over. So that I know whether to make more food for dinner, or bring enough home. The house is a _mess—”_

“I don’t think he minds,” Jon interrupts. “He’s taking a nap. But he needs your help with some splinters, so I’ll wake him.”

Dadima sighs curtly. “Did he have a tumble at the park, too?”

Jon nods. He reaches into his pocket for the tweezers he had dropped in there and holds them out to her.

Another sigh. She takes the tweezers from him. 

“Alright, then. Get him up, I’ll set these down in the kitchen. Go on.”

Jon doesn’t need to be told more than once. Already, just with her presence here, he feels all the safer.

It feels wrong to wake Gerard up so soon. Mean, almost. Like he’ll be taking something away from him that he worked hard for. It has to be done, though, if he wants those splinters out. Jon wishes he’d been able to see them himself, but he didn’t trust himself not to make a bigger mess. He knows how much splinters hurt to take out. Dadima is the best at it.

The moment that Jon’s shadow crosses over him, Gerard’s eyes flick open. Jon rips his hand back from where he had been about to shake his arm with a sharp _oh!_

Maybe he’d heard dadima come in and was awake through their conversation. Maybe he hadn’t really been asleep at all. Jon can understand — he doesn’t know if _he_ will be able to sleep tonight — but Gerard had looked so _tired_ at the table before, unable to even finish his sandwich. Jon had hoped he could at least get that half hour or so that he’d stood there uselessly between rooms.

“Dadima’s back,” Jon tells him when his heart calms down. “She can take your splinters out now, a-and I think she has dessert.”

Gerard’s eyes shift to peer past the edge of the couch before the rest of him moves, but eventually he sits up and stands. Gerard lets his arms stay hanging by his sides in a way that Jon can’t relate to. It’s as if he doesn’t feel the need to hold onto himself somehow, but maybe it’s because of his hands. Splinters have a way of making you feel like you’re made of balloons, so in danger of popping if any more pressure is put on the wrong spot.

Dadima has taken the takeaway boxes out of her plastic bags and placed them in the refrigerator, so Jon doesn’t get to see what they are. Maybe she hadn’t brought enough home to share, so she’s hiding it.

When the two of them cross into the kitchen, she looks over Gerard with what Jon identifies as _assessment_ in her eyes. She scans her eyes over him and Jon knows she’s looking at the plasters on his arms, the bruise on his cheek, the open rucksack on the table. She’s making some sort of judgement, not only about Gerard but about this situation, and crafting her approach to it carefully.

“Hello,” is her plain, noninflammatory greeting. Before she can ask his name, Jon cuts in to say it first.

“This is Gerard. I-I invited him to stay the night, is that okay?”

Surely, she wouldn’t insist that they make him leave now that night has fallen. That would be dangerous, considering— it just wouldn’t be right.

Jon looks to Gerard now with some amount of surprise. There’s assessment in his eyes, too. It’s sharper than dadima’s. It’s full of effort. He looks more awake, in the eyes. It’s almost startling. He hasn’t looked at Jon quite like that even once. Like… almost like a challenge.

Dadima clears her throat. “Yes, that’s quite alright. And you’ll be off to school together in the morning?”

Emphatically, and without knowing for certain whether it’s a lie yet, Jon nods. Dadima appears to accept this, crossing over to the cabinets to pull out a baking bowl before stepping over to the sink. She speaks over her shoulder as she turns on the knob for hot water, testing the temperature with her fingers.

“Do you often get splinters, Gerard?”

Jon watches as Gerard nods, too, ultimately leaving her question unanswered. He elbows him in the side gently, widening his eyes in prompting until Gerard mumbles a proper _yes_ out loud so that she can hear.

“Then I suspect you’re quite eager to have them out. I’ll make short work of it and fix up something to eat, then it’s off to bed with both of you. Are we agreed?”

“Yes, ma’am!” Jon answers for them both. He flitters over to the tall chairs to pull one out a bit, patting the seat of it before climbing up into the other one. Gerard follows the cue easily and sits, too, quiet as dadima places the bowl of water in front of him. She requests his hands for inspection and he hesitates to offer them to her, but not for long.

“Oh, yes,” she sighs. “About three I can see. You’re rather like my grandson, I take it.”

She may very well be calling them rambunctious, even troublesome, but Jon prefers to think himself more adventurous than anything. Hopefully Gerard hears it that way, too. It’s not a _bad_ thing, _usually,_ to come home with splinters. Just because it hadn’t come from a risky fence climb or a secret door today didn’t make the entire practice of receiving splinters completely unrespectable.

The way that she makes the observation sounds like she’s colouring in their knowing one another. She says it like Gerard would know exactly what she means, because he knows Jon. Because they’re friends who go to school together. Who sit at the same table at lunch, or on the bus. Because they’ve gone on some adventure, gotten into trouble together, made discoveries about things that perhaps they shouldn’t have run off and unearthed unsupervised.

Jon doesn’t know what the feeling in his chest is when he thinks that at least _that_ is somewhat true. They’d experienced _something_. It might count for something.

“They’re close to the surface,” dadima is saying, “but I’ll not risk hurting you. Soak them while I go find my sewing kit, just here.”

She guides Gerard’s hands into the bowl and gives both of his wrists a quick pat in parting as she pushes herself away from the counter. She sweeps out of the room and Jon listens to the receding click of her heels, reluctant to allow himself to fear that she’ll be snatched up by something shadowy in the hall before she can return. It tugs at him like a strong hand and so to fight it, he looks at Gerard.

Gerard’s brow is screwed up with something that looks a little bit like pain, but after a moment of studying him, Jon thinks it’s just concentration.

“It’s good they’re near the surface,” Jon repeats, to reassure him. “Much easier to take out.”

“Yeah.” 

It’s hard to feel slighted by Gerard’s near silence. It’s the sort of wordlessness that Jon knows a lot of people tend to get mad at; people have gotten angry at him for the same. They would act like he wasn’t listening, like he was being rude on purpose. He doesn’t think that’s why Gerard isn’t saying much back.

As talkative as he can be on a good day, Jon knows what it’s like for words to stop up in your throat like crumpled paper, and to try in vain to think of more that might speak them free only to crush them down into a terrible, choking mound. Sometimes it’s better to be quiet.

Dadima’s return sparks a deep relief in Jon’s chest. He squirms to sit more upright in his seat as she opens her sewing kit on the table to pull out a needle, and places down a few pre-packaged wipes she must have grabbed from the first aid kit along with a small towel.

“I’m just going to poke a little hole over each of them,” she explains, opening up a wipe and rubbing down the needle. “So I can get a good grip with the tweezers and pull them _right_ out. Quick as anything.”

She says it so easily, like a promise. If her words don’t ease Gerard’s heart at all, Jon doesn’t know what could.

Gerard pulls his hands from the bowl to place them down on the towel when she indicates that it’s time, and she lifts the edge of the towel to pat gently at his palms. She lifts his left hand to the light and leans in close, and there are no complaints when she delivers a light _tap_ with the needle where one of the offending slivers of wood chip sits still slightly embedded. Only the faint twitch of Gerard’s fingers, and nothing more. There isn’t even any blood.

The whole ordeal is over and done with in minutes. The swiftness of it all pulls Jon’s relief out of his chest and knits it into a warm blanket that falls around his shoulders. He’s come to lean on the table, both arms outstretched in front of him and hands drumming on the granite without rhythm. When dadima straightens to start cleaning up, he shifts upright, too.

Dadima pinches the needle one last time with an untouched section of the wipe before she drops it back into her box. “You know, I’ll want to speak with your parents in the morning.”

Gerard stares at her for so long that Jon feels the need to elbow him again. When he does, Gerard looks down like a switch had been flipped in him. His responding _okay_ is all but an outbreath, and little more.

It doesn’t seem to affect dadima at all. She continues cleaning up as she speaks. “I’m rather surprised they didn’t reach out to me first. They should be more interested in whether their son is being well taken care of.”

From the corner of his eye, Jon catches the way her gaze cuts across Gerard’s face, searching. He can’t pay closer attention to her if he’s trying to watch Gerard, too. All he sees is a pinched blankness, the wringing of sore hands.

Jon hears himself speak before he realizes what he’s saying. “We called them before we went to the park. Th-They said it’s alright he spend a-a-a, a few days! More than just one, if… if it’s alright with you, dadima.”

“A few days?” dadima repeats. Jon anticipates a sigh that doesn’t come, a harsh wind blowing around in his stomach. Gerard has turned now to stare at Jon, and Jon fights against the urge to look back with desperation for him to stop. He’ll give them away if he keeps doing that.

“We… we have a p-project, f-for art class. We have to— w-we have to make something together, a-and we thought we could do it better if… if we worked on it all day, a-after classes.”

Every one of his speech therapy lessons feels forgotten in this moment, the words staggering out of his mouth like an injured horse. His heart hammers in much the same way, dragging along his ribs unevenly. Dadima’s eyes are narrowed.

“Is that so.”

It doesn’t sound like a question. Hot, painful shards of guilt calcify in Jon’s throat and he struggles to swallow them down. His responding nod creaks in his ears. He doesn’t know _how_ he keeps speaking, but the words manage to worm their way out.

“We— We have to write a… a-a book.” Something acrid rises in his throat, burning and brief. “A picture book, w-with at least ten pages. I’ll be writing it, and Gerard is going to do the drawings! Right, Gerry?”

It slips out of his mouth like water and he can’t take it back. Friends call each other nicknames, right? That’s how you know they’re close.

Gerard has clenched his fists over his lap, and Jon can see them trembling. This next nod looks painful, almost, slow and grating like something in Gerard’s neck had rusted. 

Dadima’s mouth is puckered with scrutiny. Jon feels almost faint with the vulnerable terror of lying to her face. He hopes she isn’t thinking about the few inches Gerard has over him, the echo of _just_ a little more maturity to his features. It’s just enough that Jon had already guessed he was older without him saying so, but maybe since he’d been sitting down through most of dadima’s interaction with him, she won’t think too hard on it. Jon has always been small for his age, anyway, and he _had_ skipped year two. He prays that he’s distorted her perception of primary school children enough to let it slide.

“I look forward to seeing what you come up with, then.”

She presses no further. Jon wishes he could relax into relief, but the feeling that swells around him is smothering and he doesn’t know what it is. It comes from all sides, in and out.

The prize from bingo had been a bottle of wine, so they don’t get to partake in it. The food she had brought home, however, was fair game, and Jon had been right to assume she had brought home dessert. There is enough cheesecake to share, and Gerard accepts his portion in a manner that Jon would like to describe as ‘happily.’ He finishes his whole mug of milk chai, too, so Jon assumes he likes it.

He’s not too sure, though. Gerard is still quiet.

It is nighttime, after all, Jon tells himself. This is quite a late meal, all things considered. Jon supposes that dadima is feeling a bit apologetic for being out so long. A bit charitable, now that Jon has revealed to her that he’s capable of making friends.

Does running away from a giant spider monster on the far end of town together make two people friends straight away? Jon hardly knows. It’s not like he’s ever done it before, or that anyone he knows will be able (or willing) to vouch for the experience. It feels important. He almost wants to say ‘special,’ but that leaves a funny taste in his mouth. He can’t think of another word, though. Singular, maybe.

When their cheesecake is gone, dadima tells them to go clean up and get settled for the night. Jon hops down from his chair first, waiting for Gerard to slowly slide off of his and grab his bag off the table. He doesn’t sling it over his shoulder now, rather hugs it to his chest like a stuffed animal. Jon wonders if he has any stuffies at home that he left behind.

“Do you have night clothes in there?” he asks him. 

Gerard nods. That seems to be his language right now.

So Jon nods back, cataloguing the information, and points down the nearest hallway. 

“The bathroom’s there. You should brush your teeth, too, since you just had sugar.”

He follows Gerard’s eyes as they seek out the door he’s pointing to, satisfied enough to drop his hand when he seems to find it. It hits Jon then that Gerard should remember having already been in that room, and he didn’t need to tell him where it was. Oops.

Jon would run upstairs and get ready while Gerard does the same down here, but the upper level of the house has thus been unexplored. No lights are on up there yet. He can wait.

He chooses to drift back over to dadima in the kitchen while he does so. She’s finished with the dishes now, and has started to gather up her sewing kit to put back in the hall closet. When she notes his proximity to her, she puts everything down and beckons him closer to reach for his glasses.

“You’re _quite_ lucky to have a spare pair,” she tells him, shaking her head at the thin crack in the right lens. “We’ll see about repairing these soon.”

Jon is struck with the urge to throw his arms around her again. Fighting his impulses has always been difficult, but he manages to draw himself closer without flinging himself this time. Her blouse smells like her perfume, and in this moment Jon can’t think of anything more comforting. He hears her set the glasses down on the table before her hands settle on his shoulders. She pats them a few times, another sigh rolling out of her mouth.

“We don’t have to talk about this now. Just enjoy having your friend over.”

Jon nods against her stomach, sniffing back the returning sensation of very sudden, guilty tears. One sniff is enough to keep them back, much to his relief. Dadima touches his face when he pulls away from her and while neither of them smile, he thinks he feels a little bit better.

When he hears Gerard walk back out of the bathroom, Jon starts to cross the living room with the intent to lead the way towards the staircase. If they walk up together, the shadows cast by the bannister might not look so menacing.

He stops to look over his shoulder when Gerard drifts back over to the couch again and sits. He watches the other boy cautiously toes off his shoes so he can pull his legs up onto the cushions and finally make himself just that little bit smaller in a way that Jon recognizes and understands.

It’s a type of compression that he doesn’t think to disturb, because he doesn’t like to be moved when he starts getting smaller, either.

If Gerard wants to stay on the couch, does that mean he should move down here, too? Jon can’t predict what dadima’s advice would be if he were to ask her what to do, and Gerard doesn’t look like he has the answer, either. Jon fiddles with the wrist of his jumper.

“I have to go upstairs,” he explains. “A-All my things are up there.”

There’s a glassiness to the grey in Gerard’s eyes when he nods one more time. Has exhaustion reintroduced itself to him, or is something really wrong all of a sudden? Jon doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t rightly know what _he’s_ feeling, either. 

He knows he’s nervous about going upstairs alone but some part of him is asking the rest of him why that even is. Moments come and go where he almost forgets the reason for the pit that keeps opening and closing in his stomach. The look in Gerard’s eyes right now reminds him that they had watched someone die today.

Dadima passes through the living room on her way to the hall closet with her sewing kit. She comes back without it, and with their spare quilt instead. Jon observes as she unfolds it halfway and takes it upon herself to drape it over Gerard’s knees. 

Gerard stops looking quite so vacant for a moment as he looks up at her face, hands curling in the blanket. He doesn’t seem able to say _thank you_ with his words, but he lets dadima pat his knee over the quilt before she backs away. Jon feels helpless again for some reason, and can’t put words as to why.

“Upstairs, Jon,” dadima reminds him quietly. He flinches at the sound of his own name, glancing quickly between her and Gerard. His mouth flaps uselessly for a moment, at a crossroads.

Dadima doesn’t drag him along or usher him away, instead disappearing down the hall to her study. Gerard is staring at a spot on the wall and Jon is afraid to look at it.

“...O-Okay, well. I’m… going to go up, now.”

Predictably, disappointingly, Gerard says nothing. Jon feels the cold squeeze of mounting terror building in his stomach as he turns around to face the hallway. 

Some part of him almost wants to scramble up the stairs on all fours as fast as he can, to make the trip that much shorter. Another part is terrified to take less than a full minute to climb up each step, lest one of them creak under his foot and alert something waiting in the dark. In the end he decides to take it slow, pressing closely to the wall as if it will keep that side of him safe, if not the rest of him. 

The moment he reaches the light switch at the top of the stairs, he flicks it on and makes a mad dash for the bathroom, slapping that light switch on, too. Safe.

His bedroom ceiling looks strange with all the lights on when there is no sunset streaming through his window to join it, but Jon refuses to let the entirety of night settle upon him. All around him. Even changing into his pyjamas is a terrifying ordeal; the brief moment of pulling a new shirt over his head means that, for that fraction of a split second, he isn’t able to see. Nothing materializes in front of him, or behind him, or off to either side. He all but dives into bed the moment that he’s able.

He spends the next hour lying flat on his back and completely still. The blankets are pulled all the way up to his neck, a protective reinforcement. Still, every time the wind rustles past his window, the back of his neck prickles anyway and he wishes that he had never opened that book.

In this still silence, Jon starts to remember bits and pieces. He doesn’t think he had really _forgotten_ any of it; it’s all right there once the image of Mr. Spider comes crawling back into his mind. A phantom brush of hairy sensation brushes against his arms and he crosses them tightly in rebellion against it, and when it moves to his legs he pulls them up. When he hears footsteps come up the stairs, he holds his breath. 

It takes until he hears the sound disappear down the hall for him to fully realize that it was only dadima finally going to bed. He lets out the air in a wheezing gush when it starts to hurt, the heat of it stifling between the blanket and his face.

Curling up to face the wall would feel nicer — feeling his own breath bouncing less painfully off of the paint and coming back at him warmly, the security of facing a solid force — but leaving his back open to the empty room would be a nightmare.

A nightmare does come when he finally closes his eyes, and he wakes up with another smear of _forgetting_ in mind. All Jon has is an uncomfortably lit and all too quiet bedroom that he doesn’t want to be in by himself anymore. He’s out of bed before he fully realizes that another hour has passed since he tried to lie down, tiptoeing down the stairs in his socks. He keeps his blanket bunched securely around his neck for protection, and wishes that he had enough hands to keep it tightly wrapped around the rest of him, too.

Gerard is still awake. Jon almost can’t understand how, before he remembers why he’s here again. His chest burns with guilt for so many things.

“Oh, you’re awake,” he observes, clumsy. “I was just— I-I-I, I couldn’t sleep.”

“Me, neither.”

The sound of Gerard’s voice brings a relief so powerful that it comes crashing down over the fire of Jon’s guilt like a wave. It doesn’t put it out all at once. He can’t tell now if the sting behind his eyes is from salt or smoke.

“Can—” Jon cuts himself off to swallow. His voice is small, trapped. “Can I sit with you? I don’t— I don’t want to be alone.”

Gerard moves to make room on the couch, pulling his quilt along with him. He stands up to readjust it around himself before sitting back down as Jon does, the two of them individually cocooned in their own blankets. Jon pulls his knees up and presses himself backwards into the cushions, and Gerard sits cross-legged.

Jon doesn’t know what compels him to lean over. Gerard stays still as Jon tips over to rest his head against the slumped slope of Gerard’s shoulder, almost slipping behind him to wedge between his back and the couch. Hiding, he knows, from something that they might not be able to see in the room.

“I had a dream, I think,” he confesses with a whisper. “I’m scared it’ll come back, I’m scared of— Gerry, I-I’m _really scared.”_

“I know.”

“Aren’t you?”

Gerard answers without missing a beat.

“Yeah. All the time.”

Jon can’t tell what to blame for the sting behind his eyes. There is no brushfire in his chest, no tidal wave built up from the farthest ocean. There’s only the uncomfortable heat of his own breath ventilating unevenly through the fabric of Gerard’s quilt, and the insistence of tears. His voice comes out wet and fractured when he speaks again.

“I don’t know what to do.”

Gerard goes quiet again. Impatience claws its way up Jon’s throat, the urge to beg for a response — _any_ sort of answer that could help him stop feeling this way.

What Gerard gives him instead is a nudge with his elbow. Rejected, a bit afraid, Jon struggles to straighten himself up and get away from him, fighting the constraint of his blanket. When Gerard wriggles an arm free from his own, Jon freezes.

A surge of cold rushes through him when Gerard’s arm fits itself around his shoulders and pulls him into his side. His eyes shut tight: this is when the headlock comes, the squeeze around his throat until he gags, or begs, or both. He waits for the hard press of knuckles to the crown of his head.

It doesn’t come. Gerard’s arm stays looped around him, and it doesn’t feel like a bear trap. Jon’s next breath shutters out of him, lost in the fluff of their overlapping blankets, and he cries.

Quietly at first, but it’s difficult to hide it once it starts. He curls to bury his face as much as he can, to pretend it isn’t happening. Gerard’s arm only squeezes tighter around him.

“It’s alright,” Gerard starts to say. His voice is flat, too soft. Jon holds his breath so he can hear what comes next. “You shouldn’t be scared of the spider. It’s already eaten, so it’ll be full. It should leave us alone.”

Jon’s breath rushes back out with a sob. Gerard goes rigid, frozen.

“...Sorry. M’sorry.”

Jon has no response yet, caught up in his fit. He doesn’t know how long he cries for, but when he feels the movement of Gerard wrestling his other hand out of his blanket wrap, he peeks up from where he’d buried his head against his side.

Gerard is wiping his own face. Oh.

For a moment, Jon stays still and quiet. Gerard had been crying, too.

Gerry is scared, too. He watched someone die, too. He’s here in Bournemouth on his own, with no mother or father or grandparents or anyone. There is a bruise on his cheek and he’s out of sandwiches, and he’s just as afraid as Jon is. Maybe more.

Jon bolts upright off the couch. He sniffs loudly, his hands wrenched in his blanket to keep it around his shoulders. Gerry looks stricken, then, by the sudden confiscation of solid weight to hold onto. Jon did it for a reason; he’s going to make this up to Gerry. As much of it as he can.

“You should sleep in my room. If the spider comes back. So you have someone watching out for you.”

Gerry stares at him. ‘Puzzled’ doesn’t begin to cover the look on his face. It’s blurry without his glasses, but Jon can sense the shape of his confusion. The enormity of it. Maybe it has to do with how clearly he had managed to deliver the words, in the wake of all his stuttering. A small piece of Jon is almost proud of himself.

In the end, Gerry stands, wiping the other side of his face.

He brings his blanket and pillow with him and, once in Jon’s room, drops them onto the floor with his rucksack. Jon rushes back onto his bed, shuffling around on his knees to watch for whatever Gerry does next.

Jon had left the lights on, and intends to keep them that way. It doesn’t seem to stop Gerry from stopping to stare at the dark space beneath Jon’s bed, standing motionless with a palpable dread written across his face.

Jon jumps into action immediately. He shrugs his blanket off and slinks off the bed, willing himself not to stare into the dark, too. Not to think about his exposed ankles, and whatever could reach out and grab them.

He reaches for the flat sheet and pulls it free from where the bottom end is trapped under the foot of the bed. With some maneuvering, he readjusts it so that the long edge pools along the floor, tucking it generously between the bed frame and the mattress.

“There,” he declares when he’s finished. “If it’s covered, it’s closed.”

He turns around to face Gerry with some expectancy, a little bit of hope. Gerry’s eyes look wet again, but very aware. Not like how they had been when he looked numbly at dadima before, not like when he had been falling asleep at the table.

He’s staring at the blanket curtain with an expression that Jon can’t describe in his own head for the life of him, and for the life of him, all Jon wants to hear is that it makes him feel better.

“Gerry?” he prompts. “It’s okay now, right? Not as bad?”

Gerry looks at him now. In increments, he seems to collect himself. Again, yet again, he nods his head. The _thank you_ he gives is as faint as the fog wafting between Jon’s own concept of _remembering_ and _not._

Jon still remembers, but there’s enough of a fog there to keep him focused on what he thinks is more important. Gerry had been awake when he’d gone downstairs. He’d only gotten a few minutes of a maybe-nap before dadima got home. He needs to be able to sleep without staring into some dusty abyss under Jon’s bed.

Gerry lowers himself down onto the floor. Only when he’s situated does Jon jump back into bed, flopping around a little bit to get a grip on his blanket after realizing he’d pinned it underneath himself. After a minute of tossing and turning, he successfully wraps himself up again and puts his head to the pillow with a _poff._

“You’re right, probably,” Jon says, carefully, so the words don’t run away from him. “About it being too... full, to chase after us. At… at least for tonight anyway, right?”

“I think so,” he hears Gerry murmur from the floor. Jon scoots closer to the edge of his bed so he can see him in case he needs to start nodding again.

“S-So, we should be safe?”

It was a good choice. Gerry nods.

“Good,” Jon says. “I think… I think it helps that you’re here, too, a-and not still out there. I don’t… _think_ dadima will make you leave too soon.”

Jon pauses. He realizes all at once that the inside of his cheek hurts from biting on it.

“I-I’ve never lied to her like that before. Do you think she’ll hate me for it?”

Gerry stares up at the ceiling. The bruise on his cheek is a red shadow in the light.

“No,” he says. “Don’t think so.”

The question squeaks its way out of Jon’s mouth before he can stop it. “Really?”

“Really,” Gerry repeats. “She. She seems… Nice.”

Jon sniffs again. Dadima had been nice, yes. There’s a part of Jon that knew she would be, and a few other parts that are still faintly surprised. She had made more contact with him tonight than she usually does in a week. He can still hear the exhaustion in her tone, but there was just enough love there to tide him over.

It occurs to him now that the pads of his thumb and index finger feel numb from rubbing the blanket between them. He doesn’t stop doing it, only briefly wondering when he’d started.

Anxiety coils and roils and _boils,_ starts to bubble and push up his throat, and the next half a sentence comes out sounding more like one very long word.

_“I’m sorry I said we have to make a—”_ A sharp halt, a train grinding to catch the station and nearly skidding past it. “…a-a _book._ It— It was…”

The first thing that popped into his head. It could be funny if it didn’t make him feel sick.

“It’s okay,” Gerry says. “I like to draw.”

Jon perks up a bit to look at him straighter. “Do you think if we really make one, sh-she’ll let you stay longer?”

He catches the shrug of Gerry’s shoulders. “We could try.”

Settling down again, Jon curls himself around the edge of the mattress. “What… should we do if she asks to call your parents again?”

Gerry’s jaw stiffens. Jon waits. He almost expects another shrug, but Gerry whispers a response that is so close to inaudible that Jon strains to hear it.

“I don’t want to call my mum.”

Jon looks down at him in silence. He can’t understand that. He wishes his own mother were reachable by phone, more than anything sometimes. 

It must be very bad, for Gerry to feel the very opposite.

Jon is sure to whisper his response back.

“Okay. I won’t let her make you.”

Gerry reaches up with both hands to his face now, rubbing his eyes with two different levels of intensity. His fingers curl loosely over the splotch on his cheek, knuckles swiping all the way down along his temple. 

When he drops his hands again, he glances at Jon and looks at him for a moment before nodding a few more times all at once. Then he rolls over onto his side to face the bed, tugging his rucksack closer to him like a pillow. Like a shield.

“I’ll take the blame for it,” Gerry says. “If she gets mad.”

Jon shakes his head. “No. I’m the one who lied.”

“You lied about _me.”_

“But she’s _my_ dadima.”

“That’s the reason,” says Gerry. “You have to live with her after I leave.”

Jon pulls his blanket tighter around himself. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

Gerry presses his chin into his rucksack. “I haven’t done anything right, either.”

Something tightens in Jon’s throat again. His voice quivers like a bowstring.

“...Y-You stood up for me.”

It’s a weak argument. Maybe that doesn’t count as anything that Gerry could have done right. No one had ever done it before, so perhaps it was the real mistake here all along.

But Gerry looks up at him with those wet gray eyes and doesn’t look away for a long time. Jon huddles in his blanket and looks back, uncertain of what he’s praying for as his mind races and swirls into smears of colour and spider legs and yearning.

“Yeah,” Gerry agrees. “I did.”

Jon doesn’t know what that amounts to. He swallows again and it’s like choking back a wad of chewing gum.

“You really didn’t need to,” he all but wheezes out. The words grate against every part of him that just wants to say _thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you._ “You— You could have—”

“What?” Gerry asks. _“Watched?”_

“Yeah,” Jon gasps. “Th-that’s what everyone does. It’s— it’s easier.”

Gerry’s eyes go sharp again for a moment. He shakes his head slowly.

“Not me,” he says. “I’ll never do that.”

The conviction in his voice is startling. It’s almost angry. Jon looks at him with drowning eyes, blurring with wetness. He tugs his blanket up to his nose to hide as much as he can without losing sight of Gerry completely.

Gerry softens again when he hears the hitch in Jon’s breath. He doesn’t shift to sit up. His nails just rake against the stiff fabric of his rucksack as he grips it tighter. Jon wipes his eyes with his blanket and puffs out a breath that he hopes will set him right again. 

It takes a few tries. Gerry is patient. He watches, but not the way Jon knows so well. It feels different now, being watched as he cries. It’s not the same as so many times before. He can’t begin to explain it — the words aren’t even close to the tip of his tongue, rather nesting stubbornly somewhere at the very bottom of his throat. It’s just— it’s just _different._

It’s Jon’s turn to give a quiet _thank you._ It comes out more strangled than Gerry’s had, clumsier and wetter and altogether more desperate. He can’t stuff it back in his mouth and try again, but it doesn’t seem that he has to. Gerry shifts his chin onto the top of his rucksack and fixes him with a new sort of look.

“As long as you’re… watching out for _me,_ ” Gerry says, slowly, like the concept only exists in another language, “I’ll watch out for you. Nothing is going to get you while I’m here.”

Jon finds himself nodding frantically. “You, too. Me, too. We’ll— We’ll keep each other safe. Right?”

“Right.”

Gerry presses his mouth against his rucksack again and closes his eyes. Jon watches his shoulder rise up with a deep breath and slowly sink again.

He can’t think of anything else to say after that. The exchange of promises replays itself in his mind once, twice, three times, more. The lamplight nearby is starting to make the very act of seeing just _itch,_ and so he shuts his eyes, too. The only sounds in the room now are the buzz of light bulbs, and soft sniffs from both of them between increasingly longer intervals of silence.

Hazily, just as he’s dropping off, he catches the sound of a zipper opening and closing. The subsequent rustle of Gerry readjusting his grip on his rucksack tells Jon that he isn’t getting up to leave, at least. A bleary blink does nothing to tell Jon what he’d been taking out of his bag, other than that he’s holding it in his hand and has gone still again.

He doesn’t have the strength left in him to investigate. He’ll check in the morning. For the moment, it makes more sense to simply surrender to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *looks at jon's dadima* i wonder where he got his investigative nature from. (she may be distant and she may not be _enough_ but she isn't a demon like _some_ people, i hardly think.) also autistic speech therapy jon is real. i will not take criticism.
> 
> (also - anyone notice the way jon's narration switched to calling him gerry once he realized he's really a friend? haha Nice! dies)
> 
> catch me at @[gerrydelano](http://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/) on tumblr 🤙
> 
> _[edited on 8/27/2020; changing "nana" to "dadima" throughout]_


	3. a shot across the bows

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I think we need to make plans,” Jon begins. He pulls out a notebook from his rucksack to drop it in front of him, and then starts fishing out a thick pencil case.
> 
> “I don’t know anything about monsters, but… but you do. So, I need you to tell me everything.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **CWs in the end notes!**
> 
> EDIT 8/27/2020: added things to the breakfast scene! search "flatbread"

_a shot across the bows - a warning shot, either real or metaphorical_

───── ☆ ─────

Gerard wakes up with a crick in his neck and his torch still tightly in his hand. He comes to slowly, resistant to the idea of opening his eyes. Molding himself to his rucksack had left him stiff and sore, his arms unwilling to unlatch from the bind they have around it. His lungs feel dusty and cramped when he draws in a deep breath to stretch them out, nose wrinkled against the feeling. It almost makes him cough a bit, and that makes him finally look up and around him.

The sheet curtain in front of him hasn’t moved. There is nothing peeking out from underneath it, no prickly little bugs feet or thorny hands reaching. Instead, Gerard meets eyes with a very round orange dinosaur with a soft smile, and trails up to the other colourful shapes around it. Trees, volcanoes, little polka dots.

Jon is staring at him over the edge of his bed. His forefinger is overlapping the gentle face of something friendly and green, the rest of his fingertips placed incidentally along its long neck like a recorder. Gerard doesn’t flinch away from the gaze; it’s very decidedly non-threatening, however wide-eyed and unblinking.

“We have to get up,” Jon informs him. “The bus will be here soon.”

The bus. That’s right; Jon’s grandmother thinks that Gerard goes to the same school as he does, and that they’re going to be catching the bus together.

Gerard pushes himself up to sit with a wince, the eye above his sore cheek winking closed. The moment he moves, Jon all but flings himself out of bed, as if the only thing that had kept him perched there like that was the fact that Gerard had been asleep still. Gerard wonders how long he’s been awake.

Gerard changes into his other set of clothes while Jon goes to brush his teeth, and examines the room around him for the first time. There are books scattered all around, on shelves, on the desk, even a few on the floor. Dinosaurs seem to be a big theme: there are some figurines scattered around, some posed together in brawls while others lie on their sides after tipping over. The walls are a bright, happy blue. 

The closet door is closed: had Jon done that last night when he came up here to monster-proof it? Had he drawn his curtains so quickly they’d almost come right down? The rod looks a little crooked from where Gerard can see. Jon must have pulled them too hard.

Gerard doesn’t cross over to fix it. He would have to stand up on Jon’s bed to reach, and there’s no time now. Jon steps back into the room as he contemplates what to do, jostling him out of his thoughts.

“Okay, go brush your teeth now.” Jon gives the instruction like he’s reading out a list of must-do-in-this-order morning activities, easy and routine. Gerard watches him for a second as he rushes over to his desk to open a drawer and rifle through whatever’s inside, only pausing to open up his rucksack nearby as wide as it goes.

Scooping up his own bag, Gerard fishes out the plastic baggie containing his toothbrush and leaves the room. He hadn’t gotten a good look at this hallway last night, either. The lights had been turned down by the time he’d been brought up here, presumably against Jon’s wishes and absolutely against his own. The bathroom isn’t hard to find, seeing as Jon left the door wide open.

His reflection looks different somehow with daylight streaming through the window. The bruise on his cheek isn’t so bad now after sleeping, he thinks. Maybe it had looked worse when he had been thinking harder on how much it hurt to receive. Bruises are easy to forget about after a bit of waiting. Easier than burns.

It’s his hair that almost bothers him. Gerard runs his fingers through it to shake the sleep out, shoving it away from his face. His face that doesn’t really look like a face sometimes, no matter how hard he stares at it. Sometimes it blurs into nothing, features lost in some sort of fog. Right now, he thinks it’s the daylight streaming through the window that makes it hard to recognize himself.

When he returns to Jon’s room, Jon is hefting his rucksack onto his back. It looks almost too big for him, too full, too heavy. Jon doesn’t seem to mind it, though his balance sways a bit when he turns on a heel to face the door.

“If we hurry up we can have cereal first,” Jon huffs out. Gerard moves over so that he can step out into the hall. After a second, he decides to snag his own bag up off the floor before following.

Somewhere around halfway down the staircase, Jon pauses. It’s at that moment that the scent of warm food hits Gerard in a gentle wave. 

Craning his neck, Gerard leans forward a bit to peer at Jon’s face. There’s some mild surprise there, for some reason. Before Gerard can reach for his shoulder and shake him out of it, he thumps his way down the rest of the stairs and stops again at the mouth of the kitchen.

On the table in front of the chairs are two plates of fragrant flatbread folded onto each of them, cut into pieces and arranged around small, ceramic bowls. At the edge are two paper bags, folded neatly and closed with little pieces of tape. In front of the sink stands Jon’s grandmother, washing her hands. 

No, not grandmother _— dadi._ Right.

“Good morning,” she greets them. “Hurry up and eat. We don’t want you running late.”

Jon approaches the table at a shuffle. Gerard follows suit. Neither of them end up taking off their packs as they climb up onto the chairs. Gerard watches as Jon picks up a piece of his bread, and does the same; it’s stuffed with potato, and something else that smells good. He’s not sure what it is. He studies it a little in his hand before Jon pokes him with an elbow.

“They’re aloo parathas,” he explains, dipping the corner of his into the little bowl on his plate. “My bebe made them all the time. We put amchoor in them, so it’s kind of sour but they’re _really_ good.”

Gerard’s mouth twists, confused. Those are a lot of words he’s never heard before. Out of the corner of his eye, dadi turns around to glance at him.

“Mango powder,” she tells him. “Don’t worry, it’s not quite as sour as it sounds. You can taste the sweetness, too.”

“And you’ve got to dip them in the yogurt,” Jon adds. “It’s better that way.”

Hm. Gerard hadn’t been worried about eating it as much as he was curious and intrigued, so that’s good to know. He sniffs the piece he’d been studying one more time before taking a bite out of the corner. It takes effort not to melt in his seat. He tries the next bite with the yogurt.

Even then, though. As Jon stares intently at his plate while he eats, Gerard keeps his eyes firmly locked on dadi. He watches how she keeps herself busy with dish towels and sweeping crumbs until everything is spotless. She looks to Jon first, quickly, before her gaze settles on Gerard and stays there.

There’s something in her eyes that makes Gerard want to squirm away, which must mean that it isn’t entirely safe to do so. It’s analytical, scrutinizing. Like she’s trying to peel back different layers of him and read for herself why he’s here. What to do with him.

Gerard doesn’t want to give her an answer. He doesn’t want to ruin just yet the feeling of having a warm meal like this in front of him; it tastes just as good as it smells. He doesn’t want to give that up just yet.

“Gerard, why don’t you give me your phone number?” dadi says, effectively stopping his chewing. “I’d like to give your parents a ring. Touch base with them.”

His last bite goes down hard. Jon fumbles around a mouthful of his own in what Gerard thinks is some sudden attempt to come up with an effective lie, but nothing manages to come out. 

Gerard takes a deep breath through his nose. The air tastes a little funny going down his throat. He can’t let Jon keep trying to save him. Especially when he will never really be able to.

“My…” he tries, and falters. Despite brushing his teeth, despite the aloo parathas, his mouth feels dry and stale. “My mum is asleep by this time. She w…” 

Now it makes sense. The smell of food only quickens the onset of nausea. He almost regrets ever putting any in his mouth. It’s making him slower on the uptake. Too slow, if the quirk of dadi’s brow is any indication.

“She works. In the night.”

There. That’s something. That should be something. 

He hopes it’s something. Gerard keeps still, waiting for the moment that he’s told that it isn’t enough.

“What does she do?” dadi asks instead. Careful. Probing. 

Gerard tries as hard as he can to ignore the twitch in his lungs that wants him to start breathing faster. He feels apprehended. Caught in something he doesn’t know how to get out of.

“She…” 

Why is this so hard? He should have come up with some kind of story on the train. Long before the train. For a moment, he struggles to imagine what normal parents actually do for work. What does dadi do for work? What might she respect?

“It’s time to go, dadima,” Jon pipes up. “We’ll be late if we keep on talking.”

Dadi straightens up from how she had come to press both of her hands to the table, eyeing her grandson with something Gerard no longer has the will to identify. She clears her throat; a curt, prim little sound. 

“Yes, very well. Don’t forget your lunch bags.”

Gerard watches as Jon hesitates in getting off of his tall chair. Only after Jon reaches for one of the bags does Gerard do the same.

This is three meals, now, that dadi has allowed him. He wants to say something, but his throat had been stoppered up again. He feels like a shaken bottle. Whatever words might come out instead of _thank you for the food_ are words he doesn’t want to risk. 

The daylight is warm, but the breeze is just like yesterday. Just enough to chill the tips of Gerard’s ears a bit as he and Jon walk side by side down the street, the both of them holding onto the straps of their rucksacks with two hands. 

It smells different here than on the streets around his mum’s flat. Cleaner. Grassy. No ocean salt, though. Gerard wonders if he’ll ever get to visit the water before he has to leave. He wouldn’t put his money on it.

Jon keeps looking over his shoulder. Sometimes, he has to skip to keep up with Gerard. His pack must be slowing him down a bit, or maybe his legs are really just that short. Gerard doesn’t know how fast his own pace is. He’d spotted the sign for the bus stop and started towards it, and that’s all that he has the capacity to think about at the given moment.

It’s only when they reach it and Jon keeps walking that he stops. Jon turns, tilting his head.

“Come on, Gerry,” he urges. “We have to go before somebody sees us.”

“You’re not going to school?” Gerard finds himself asking, numbly.

Jon makes a face. “And leave you?”

_That’s not what I meant,_ Gerard wants to say, but he knows. He knows that the only option here was to pretend to go, and then lie again. He can’t just stow away on the bus to a school he doesn’t attend and get away with it.

Gerard hadn’t put any money on that, either, but it doesn’t stop him feeling robbed.

He tries not to let his head hang as he falls into step with Jon again. His pace does feel slower now, come to think of it. Jon doesn’t skip forward again at any point while they continue down the street, and start to turn corners upon reaching the edge of the neighbourhood.

“Where are we going?” he ventures to ask. He winces a bit at the sound of his own disappointment. 

“I know a place,” Jon says. “Nobody will bother us there. I’ve hid there all day before and not been caught.”

“On a school day?”

For the first time since they met, Gerard thinks, Jon laughs. It’s a high, strained little thing. There isn’t all that much humour in it; it sounds guilty as much as it sounds giddy and proud.

“No, this is the first— I-I’ve never not gone to school before. Not unless I’m sick.”

Gerard feels his jaw tighten. He doesn’t want this envy, but it has taken shape somewhere inside him anyway.

“Lucky.”

Jon bumps into his arm then, like he’d lost his balance a bit. Gerard isn’t surprised; that bag really does look absurd on him.

“I would skip every day if I could,” Jon tells him. “I would rather go out to different places and— and learn about things there, like paleontologists o-on expeditions. They learn about dinosaurs by finding their bones, and they can’t do that in a classroom. _They_ have to _go_ to the _bones."_

Now Gerard scoffs. “You’re too young to be playing with bones.”

“What would you know?”

When Gerard cuts eyes at him, he sees that Jon looks entirely too genuine in his curiosity for it to be the taunt it sounded like. He faces forward.

“I know I would rather be in school than play with bones.”

“I think it matters what kind of bones. Don’t you want to see a dinosaur up close?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it.”

“I have.” For a second, Jon sounds a little out of breath with excitement. “I know I have to go to school to be able to be an archaeologist or a paleontologist, but if I could do it by myself it’d be better. I don’t like my class.”

The envy bubbles uncomfortably under the skin of Gerard’s arms. “Why not?”

Jon shrugs. “They didn’t like me first.”

Oh. Gerard purses his lips, watching the sidewalk.

Jon leads the way to a library. Of course. More books. Gerard wants to complain, to stiffen away and refuse to go inside. School would be one thing — Gerard knows there would be books there in the same way that there are books scattered around Jon’s bedroom — but a library? A place where there is literally nothing _but?_

He stops short of the pavement that curves towards the front entrance before he can tell himself that it’s stupid to be uncomfortable. Jon notices after a few more steps and turns back around to meet him, and he does this funny little thing. This thing where he steps right up to Gerard and leans forward to crane his neck, looking up to catch his eye; Gerard hadn’t realized he’d ducked his head down until Jon was peering at him from an angle underneath, eyebrows up high on his forehead.

“What’s the matter?” he inquires. “We’re gonna sneak around, but we gotta be quick.”

“I don’t…” Gerard glances to the other side, and Jon only leans over to follow him. “I don’t want to go in there.”

“We’re not going in there for long. We’re going up _there."_

With one hand, Jon reaches to tug on Gerard’s sleeve. When Gerard finally looks up, he points with the hand still holding his lunch bag in the direction of the roof.

“There’s stairs inside,” Jon clarifies in a whisper, as if there are listeners nearby. “I jiggled the door handle once and it popped open. I don’t think they know it’s broken. I go up all the time.”

Gerard straightens to look Jon in the face. For all of his stuttering and fluttering, there is an ease to his declaration that almost immediately makes Gerard reconsider his stance on entering the library. They’re not going _in_ it, just… through it. That makes something of a difference, somewhat.

There is no chime or bell when they step through the doors, only the faint _whoosh_ of the bristles underneath rubbing against the carpet as they open and close. The woman behind the desk is rifling through creaking metal file cabinets, her back turned to the entrance. Gerard keeps his eyes on her as he follows the sound of Jon sneaking off to the left in a hurry, until there’s no point in watching her anymore.

Jon seems to make himself even smaller as he walks, quickly and close to the stacks. Gerard doesn’t quite manage the same. Just keeps a tight hold on his lunch bag to ensure it doesn’t crinkle. It’s so early in the morning that there’s hardly anyone there to begin with. The carpeting muffles their footsteps.

When they reach the door, Jon turns around to tell Gerard to _shhh,_ a finger squished up against his lips. Something like amusement prickles in Gerard’s chest. Not quite enough to laugh, though. They’re still sneaking. He watches the room while Jon fiddles with the doorknob, wiggling it up and down until something gives a soft _pop._

The roof is flat and open, all grit and debris from nearby trees and gravelly bits dropped by birds, by the wind. Jon makes his way immediately to a protrusion that looks like a chimney and starts to take off his bag, dropping it to the ground and plopping down beside it to sit. When he opens his bag, Gerard immediately sees why he would want to sit somewhere that might block the breeze.

“I think we need to make plans,” Jon begins. He pulls out a notebook from his rucksack to drop it in front of him, and then starts fishing out a thick pencil case. Through the clear plastic front of it, Gerard can see that it’s positively _stuffed_ full of pencils and coloured markers. What hadn’t fit in there, apparently, were two handfuls of highlighter pens that Jon messily grabs out of the bag afterwards to place among the rest of his supplies. Gerard bends over to stop the blue one from rolling and places it against the rings of the notebook.

“I don’t know anything about monsters, but… but you do. So, I need you to tell me everything.”

“Everything?” Gerard realizes after he’s asked the question that it isn’t quite directed at Jon. He shakes his head. Backs away a step. “No.”

“Why not?” Jon presses. “What if— What if that thing comes back and you’re not here a-and I have to—”

“That won’t happen.”

“How do you know?” Jon wrings his hands in his lap, his face distressed. “How do you know that?”

“I just _do,_ ” Gerard insists. He doesn’t, though. He doesn’t think he knows anything. Not the way that Jon seems to think he does. “Stay away from that house, and throw away any book that makes you feel like you can’t think right.”

Jon’s face crumples. “That’s it?”

“That’s it.” 

No, it isn’t. It never is. Nothing has ever been that simple. 

Jon shouldn’t have to _know_ how complicated things can get. Gerard doesn’t understand it all. He doesn’t know what he’s really saying when Mum makes him repeat phrases out loud, has him write them a hundred times in notebooks she winds up burning. He doesn’t _know_ what she means when she slaps him for misunderstanding, he doesn’t _want_ to know. Why does Jon insist he tell him? Why couldn’t they have just tried their luck with the bus?

Jon’s shoulders drop, his hands loose in his lap. Gerard hasn’t sat down yet. It’s hard to look at him when he’s making that face. That miserable, abandoned expression, his black eyes streaked with wetness behind the lenses of his glasses. These ones are unbroken, but like the other pair they’re still much too big for his face. The plea is small and desperate.

“Gerry, please?”

Something shifts. Gerard isn’t sure what it is, but it makes him sit down.

Jon lights back up so quickly that it’s hard to believe he’d ever looked so sad to begin with. He reaches for the notebook and opens it up to the very first page, which Gerard is surprised to see pristine. He just has big, empty notebooks like that lying around?

“We should start with the spider,” Jon decides. “Since we know it lives nearby.”

Gerard nods. If Jon is to encounter any other terrible creatures, it might very well be that one again. He doesn’t know if it travels with the book, but maybe he can skip telling Jon that part. One thing at a time.

And so they start with the spider. _Was it really a spider?_ Something like that. _What else could it be?_ I don’t know. _Have you ever seen anything like that before?_ Worse.

The more he says, the less he feels. The easier it comes out, and the less he cares about how wrong it is to share this sort of thing with another person. Is it more dangerous to tell Jon about this, or would it be worse to let him face the horrors of the world completely unprepared? Mum might call either of them a necessary sacrifice. To what, Gerard isn’t sure. 

He just knows he doesn’t want Jon to die, and the more he thinks about it, the more sense it makes to just tell him how to save himself. He drills in the importance of torches and batteries, of protecting your neck. Of not making eye contact unless you can rise to the challenge, like looking a wolf in the face and convincing it that you’re simply not worth attacking.

More often than anything he finds himself repeating, it’s the word _run._

As Jon writes in his book, they both wriggle around in search of comfortable positions. Jon winds up lying on his stomach, the toes of his trainers bouncing off of the chimney structure behind him as he idly kicks his legs. Gerard reclines against his rucksack, and eventually turns over to hug his arms around it. He speaks into the stiff fabric and lets it muffle him, and Jon continues to understand. He closes his eyes against a gust of wind and listens to the sound of Jon’s markers scraping the page while he colours in an elaborate diagram.

It is not lost on Gerard that this is a strange and mournful way to conduct their day. They’re going to have so few, after all. Of course he wouldn’t be so lucky as to be able to spend it doing something more fun, like exploring the beach. 

“I would have gone after him myself, too, you know,” Jon says suddenly, pen stalling. “Even if you weren’t there.”

“I wish you wouldn’t,” Gerard murmurs back. “Run away from these things, Jon.”

“Who says they won’t just chase after me if I do?”

“Run anyway.”

“I thought you said it’s better to do something dumb than do nothing at all.”

Gerard narrows his eyes. “Running is something.”

“I don’t think it’s very brave.” Jon crosses his arms. “It’s cowardly to leave other people behind.”

“I didn’t leave you behind when we ran.”

“But we left—”

Gerard can’t tell if Jon pauses because he can’t remember the name that comes next, or if it’s in response to the way that he’s being looked at now. Gerard can’t even tell what his own face might look like, but he knows he can’t possibly look happy.

“It was too late for him,” Gerard says. “And besides. He hurt you.”

“Did he have to die for it?”

That’s a question that Gerard doesn’t think he has an answer to. He knows he _does,_ but it isn’t the one he wants to give. Silence would answer for him differently, so he has no choice. He sits up a bit to look at Jon more directly, say it more carefully.

“People die all the time. You’re the only person I’ve ever stopped from dying.”

“So we should make sure we stop _more_ people from dying from now on.”

“Who is this ‘we,’ Jon?” Gerard spits. “Do you think— Do you think we’re a team now or something? That I’d ever let you look for these things on purpose?”

“Not on purpose!” Jon defends. “Just— J-Just _in case.”_

Gerard clenches his fists. The sore ghost of those splinters is all but gone by now, but squeezing hard almost brings back the feeling in twinges.

“When I say _run,”_ he enunciates. “I mean it. _Take off_ and _don’t_ look back.”

“B-But if there’s a-anyone else around—”

“Tell _them_ to run, too!”

Jon flinches back, shoulders jumping. “I-I-I— Th-There has to be—”

“There’s no more that you can do! You’re a _kid._ You’re too weak to fight any of this stuff.”

Now Jon looks a bit offended. “W-Well, what about you? If I’m too weak—”

“So am I.”

This much isn’t said with anger. Gerard’s fists stay curled, but his own shoulders drop with surrender. Jon shuts up for a moment, staring at him. Gerard glances at the page he’d been scribbling on. It’s full of too-big handwriting that careens off the lines in arches like spouts of water. He can’t read what it says upside down. Upside down it looks a lot like things he can’t read even right-side-up.

“I’m not saying I’m better than you,” he finally says. “Just because I’ve… seen this stuff before. This isn’t some adventure story. It’s not like in the movies where… where the good guy always wins. You don’t know what’s out there. I’m saying you don’t _want_ to know.”

“But I do know,” Jon says, quietly. “I can’t just _un_ know.”

“Can’t you try?”

Of course he can’t. Gerard already knows before he’s asking, but it doesn’t stop the words falling out of his mouth. They’re just as quiet, just as unrealistic as everything that Jon may have been building up in his head about fighting evil and coming out of it alive. 

It’s too late to just pretend he’s been making all of this up as he goes just to get a rise out of him. He’s never had the chance to take the blame like that. He knows. Jon knows. It’s too late.

“I can’t,” Jon answers anyway. “Sorry.”

Gerard feels wrung out all of a sudden. Emptied of will. He tips over onto his rucksack again and folds his arms around himself, watching the corner of the top sheet of paper in Jon’s notebook flap gently in the breeze. Jon puts down his supplies now. He pulls up his legs to hug them to his chest. A silence settles until Gerard breaks it with a confession.

“I’ve never been able to run. It’s all I want most of the time.”

Jon rests his cheek on one knee. “That why you ran from home?”

Gerard lifts his eyes to look at Jon without lifting his head. 

“Don’t tell me it’s cowardly.”

Jon’s posture loosens. “Gerry, I wasn’t saying—”

“You were. And I’m telling you you’re wrong.”

“No,” Jon insists. “I said it’s cowardly to leave other people behind. I-If you’re all alone a-and you run, then… that’s saving the only person there to save. That’s not bad.”

Gerard squints. “That’s what I was trying to tell you.”

Jon looks away, curling his arms tighter around his legs again. “I-I— I know, but I was thinking about… you know.”

The spider. The book thief. The guilt.

Gerard presses his cheek to his rucksack again. The bruise there smarts.

“Okay. I get it.”

Jon sniffs, burying his face into his knees. His glasses get shoved up onto his forehead, teetering dangerously. Gerard glances between him and a pigeon that lands not too far off from their hiding place, pecking at the gravel and coming up with nothing.

After a few minutes of quiet, Jon lifts his head with another sniff, this one more of the cleansing sort. He lets out a deep breath, unfolding himself and reaching now for his paper bag.

“We should eat our lunch now,” he says. “It’s probably more aloo parathas. We always make a _lot.”_

Gerard’s bag is close enough that he doesn’t have to sit up and reach for it, only stretch out an arm to grab it by the taped-down lip and tug it towards him. Inside is exactly what Jon predicted, sliced up like the ones from breakfast and tucked into plastic baggies. Underneath it is another baggie full of small carrots, still faintly chilled from time in the refrigerator, and a little cup of pre-packaged dip next to a sealed ramekin of the yogurt from this morning.

_“Don’t_ mix them up when you dip them,” Jon instructs. “This is _crucial.”_

Gerard pulls out the juice box next, curious at the flavour. He turns it in his hand to read the label, and looks up to find Jon just staring at his paratha.

“Does she not make you lunch usually?” Gerard asks. Jon gives a little jolt, his fingertips indenting the bread on a squeeze.

“Um,” he fumbles. “N-Not always, no. Just money to buy at school.”

“Is the school lunch bad?”

Jon shuffles uncomfortably. “I-I don’t always get to eat there.”

Gerard stops moving. “Why not?”

“B-Because— Because I lose the money, sometimes.”

Gerard stares now. Jon avoids his eyes, his mouth in a wobbly line. It doesn’t take a genius. Jon seems to understand that Gerard has figured it out, and concedes.

“I already told you I don’t like my class.”

Now Gerard wishes that they had been able to get on the bus for entirely different reasons. “And nobody does anything about it? Not even the teachers?”

Jon quiets. Gerard watches his eyes slip from where they had been studying the flatbread in his hands, landing indistinctly somewhere else. After a moment, Gerard says his name to catch his attention and earns back a thin little _hm?_ in response, but no answer.

Gerard’s gut twists like a balloon, guilt forcing it into an unnatural shape. He shouldn’t still be envious that Jon is enrolled in public school, perhaps in the same way that he thinks Jon should stop acting like not having to go is a privilege. He should say something.

“Sorry I called you lucky.”

Jon’s face goes slack again for a moment. He looks back down at the piece of bread in his hands and sighs before pulling the bag open.

“Sorry for thinking you were, too.”

After each eating half of their parathas, they sit around on the roof long enough to fill up a decent chunk of Jon’s notebook. Nowhere near the entire thing, but between Jon’s imagination about theoretical monsters and the few that Gerard is willing to tell him about, it’s more cluttered than it is untouched. 

There are still things Gerard keeps to himself. Things that sharing won’t help. He doesn’t know how to handle them anyway. 

When his mum walks up to something composed of eighty-percent teeth and twenty-percent eyeball and has something like a _conversation_ with it, the only instinct that comes alive in Gerard is the one that tells him to stay very still and not draw attention to himself. If he’s invisible, it won’t look at him, won’t decide he’d make a good meal.

He is never truly invisible, however hard he holds his tongue. He knows that they’re always looking at him sideways anyway. Looking right at him, right through him, right _into_ him, all at the same time. He knows they’re always hungry. 

He’s hidden behind his mum’s legs as she negotiated _something_ terrible with something _worse_ but he can’t recall any words, only the high pitched whine of metal and nondescript noise just buzzing in his head, screeching, scraping, sharp.

He remembers more than once being so scared that he’s seen white. Drawn out flashes cutting up his view of the darkness in front of him like a film strip. A tangle of complicated limbs. A burst of white. His mum’s smiling face leaning in front of him. Burst of white. The limbs from up close. White. Her hand on the back of his neck. White. The breath of _something_ on his face, hot and cold and wet and dry all at the same time, like a furnace in an ice box, a hungry animal in the winter as he plays dead on the forest floor and prays that it finds him miraculously rotten and leaves him there. Bursts of bright colour then, popping like firecrackers and taking down his bones one by one.

Mum’s nails gripping into his shoulder until he slips. Her skirt whispering against the back of his head, the cold ground on his hands. Metal noise still buzzing. Dark hotel room. Snatches of memory in dreams. Repeat.

Jon doesn’t need to know that.

When all of the supplies are stuffed back into Jon’s rucksack, he drums his hands on the front of it and looks out over the edge of the roof.

“Do you want to stay here longer, or go somewhere else?”

Gerard looks up from where he’s tucking his leftover lunch into his own bag. He doesn’t know yet if he wants to leave. There is something profoundly secure about being up here, far enough away from the edge that there’s no way to fall off. Way up high above anyone else. Gerard doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do with the feeling that nothing can get them while they’re up here. He knows it isn’t true, but he so desperately wants it to be.

“Where else could we go?” he asks.

Jon’s mouth twists to the side as he thinks. “There’s… there’s the park? It’s on the way back. We can’t go too far, or it’ll take us too long to get back home. We’re already really far just by being here.”

“How far is the beach?”

“It takes all day to walk there,” Jon sighs. “We’d never get back in time. Dadima would have to drive us if you wanted to go.”

“Oh.” That answers that. Gerard thinks for a moment, as well. “We could go to the park again. I like the swings.”

Jon smiles a little, then. “Me, too. Come on, let’s go.”

Sneaking back out of the library is a little harder than sneaking into it. There are two people at the front desk now, and there are more people than there had been right in the early morning. They decide to sprint for the doors one at a time, agreeing to be as quick and quiet as possible. Gerard has to wait a few minutes before he can catch up, hiding behind a wall as a staff member crosses the entrance area with a stack of books in her hands. Jon waves at him to hurry through the window, and grabs onto his sleeve once he meets him outside.

The park is even emptier now, during school hours. The only other people around seem to be parents with baby strollers, people walking their dogs. There are some young adults flying a kite in the field area some ways away from the playground, its tail whipping in the wind like a boat sail. It’s peaceful.

Jon makes a beeline for the swingset and drops his rucksack on the ground, scrambling to climb into a plastic seat. It’s a little funny watching him try to gather momentum on his own. His toes hardly hit the ground where it’s all but carved into a basin by the dragging feet of those who came before him. He can’t just tiptoe himself back and let go, and so it takes a minute for him to get himself going.

Eventually, Gerard can’t stand to watch with pity and private laughter. Instead of sitting down in his own swing just yet, he moves over behind Jon to catch his back with both hands and give him a strong push. Jon yelps in faint surprise, his concentration broken by the contact, but the response that really matters is the way he takes advantage of the new height with the stronger kick of his legs. There. Better.

Gerard gives him a few more solid pushes before he sits down, too. There is no urge to compete quite yet, no need to swing higher and prove anything despite how he could easily surpass him without help. What would be the point?

“What should our book be about!” Jon half-shouts the question. The wind sounds louder while moving. It’s whistling in Gerard’s ears, too. “We can’t forget to make it and show dadima.”

Now that he’s slept on it, Gerard doesn’t see why they have to write a book. Dadi hasn’t looked convinced by either of them since the moment Gerard met eyes with her. What good could a little paper book do for anyone? 

“I don’t know,” Gerard answers honestly. Gerard only knows grisly endings and ember sting and sacrifice and things that would get Jon into trouble if he were to hand this book in for school. If he were to give it to his grandmother. There may not be any real need to show it to her, but on the off chance that she ever sees it, Gerard doesn’t want her to think that his head is full of blood and guts and darkness. He doesn’t want dadi to see him like that.

“I only know bad stories.”

“That’s why we’re gonna write another one,” says Jon. “A good book to fight the bad ones.”

Gerard’s legs go still mid-swing, but gravity continues to move him for a while before he slows down in any noticeable way. Jon can’t drag his heels to stop himself on purpose without half-sliding off the seat, so he twists himself around to throw off his rhythm with a clack of chains and the wobbling sound of plastic. He shifts forward to get both feet on the ground, still holding onto the chains on either side of him as he faces Gerard with a… bright sort of determination that Gerard can’t quite understand.

“It’ll just be for us,” Jon tells him. “And it’ll have a happy ending. Okay?”

Gerard plants his heels in the dirt. He watches Jon for a moment to see if that determination wavers at all. If he’ll get embarrassed by the way it sounds. By believing that happy endings exist.

He doesn’t. Jon keeps his jaw squared and mouth shut tight, and holds eye contact for a lot longer than Gerard expected of him. It’s Gerard who has to break away and face forward again.

“What do you think it should be about, then?” he asks. “...Dinosaurs?”

The chains on Jon’s swing clink together as he jumps up a bit. “I have an idea for dinosaurs!”

Jon sets loose a rambling avalanche of ideas about a boy wandering through the desert to escape something far off, and finding the bones of a dinosaur close enough to the sand’s surface that he can brush the rest off himself. About something magic that happens when he touches it that brings it back to life, returns all of its skin and organs and understanding of where it is. About a shift in its allegiance, a page that’s nothing but a close-up of the dinosaur bowing its head so the kid can lay a hand on the giant bridge of its nose. Like in other stories where someone bonds with a fearsome dragon, but this time it's a Carcharodontosaurus, which Jon swears on as being way more interesting.

They drift from the swingset to the jungle gym as Jon gets to the part where the dinosaur convinces the kid to wake up some more of its friends to build an army that can all defend him from what he’d been running from. He says that Gerard can choose what they get to defeat in the end, since Jon was the one who chose all the heroes.

Gerard is about to say that he might need to think about it for a while when Jon stops mid-climb on the side of the jungle gym. He looks stricken suddenly, and stares straight ahead through the bars. Gerard is almost nervous to follow his line of sight, but he can’t avoid it for long. Jon can’t even seem to muster an _uh-oh,_ entirely frozen in terror very unlike the kind that had reduced him to tears last night.

At the mouth of the gate opening up into the playground stands dadi, silent and icy and staring. She stays still for a long moment before raising a hand to point at them both, and then down at the ground in front of her. Demanding them over without words. 

Gerard grips the jungle gym tighter. Jon seem almost unable to climb down. When he finally does, he shuffles robotically to his bag. Gerard dusts the wood chips off of it for him.

Dadi’s eyes are cold with punishment. Gerard is no stranger to that. The only option is to brace for it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **CWs: child abuse; bullying; dissociation**
> 
> i _PROMISE YOU_ that dadima is NOT going to give them as hard a time as gerry thinks! it's okay! also, there were a _lot_ of baby archivist breadcrumbs here :-)
> 
> follow me on tumblr @ [gerrydelano](http://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/)! comments and feedback also VERY much appreciated!
> 
> _[edited on 8/27/2020; changing "nana" to "dadima" throughout; added a new bit to the part where they eat breafkast!]_


	4. on your beam ends

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Miriam cannot afford to be afraid for two children at once, but this is where she has found herself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> welcome to "ron makes you recognize the complexity a woman who has, like, a handful of sentences dedicated to her in the source material and not all of them sound all that nice to begin with" hours! this serves as a bit of a character study for jon's grandmother, but mostly it's an adult's perspective on a very sticky situation and a look into how hard it is to avoid mistakes while trying to do the right thing when you know it won't end well.
> 
> EDIT 8/27/2020: added a scene at the end that's important to this one, and some more backstory about jon's mother! word search for "sarika" for anything with her, and "dadi" for the new bits with miriam.

_on your beam ends - in imminent danger of capsizing_

───── ☆ ─────

The school calls at 10:30, and Miriam confirms that her grandson is sick in bed with a head cold. The lie is bile in her mouth. She does not immediately call the police, or get up from her chair.

For all of the anger balling up inside her chest like a fist, Miriam sits for a long moment at her desk and rests her mouth against her laced fingers, thinking. 

She glances at the piece of paper pinned up on her bulletin board and the list of addresses that stretch from top to bottom. Stars are drawn in the margins next to the ones that the police had told her about before she discovered them herself as she went out to hunt down her grandson and inscribe his preferred haunts to memory.

For some time now, the list has stayed the same. None of them are all too far from the house. She can’t imagine he would choose now to stray from them. He rejects routine more than any autistic child she has ever read about when it comes to the books he’ll tolerate, but in spite of his insatiably exploratory nature, he has his set number of favourite places to sit and read them.

Urgency simmers deep inside of her like the very acid in her stomach has been taken up in a boil, and a scream in the confines of her skull begs her body to explain why it isn’t moving. Why she hasn’t swept out of her study to rush out the door and drive around the entire city searching, why she hasn’t phoned anyone for help. Is it because it’s happened so many times already? Every time she’s had to resort to calling the police, she’s also been reduced to tears and near-illness. Where is the burn behind her eyes?

Urgency simmers, but this is different than the last few times.

Jon isn’t alone this time. He’s with someone. That doesn’t automatically mean that he’s safe. Quite the contrary, potentially, given that his companion is the grubby child who had spent a night in her house for clear lack of anywhere else to go. Who very well could be getting him into the same kind of mayhem that must have broken his glasses yesterday. Who convinced him somehow he should try his hand at lying to her. 

Whose very presence, it would seem, had successfully done something to _change_ him in some way, like taking down trees in a forest so dense she cannot enter and catch them. She had not heard anything fall, but the scattering of birds overhead tells her now that something precious had lost its home in Jon and it has something to do with that other boy.

Maybe it’s anger that has rendered her hollow. There are so many things she could be furious with. Plenty to take it out on.

The simplest option would be to blame the children. She could let herself bungee backwards to the moment that she had judged the young boy who had shuffled into her kitchen and looked at her with the eyes of a convict floundering for his freedom. She could go back to the shallow decision she made to call him _trouble,_ could rip her grandson away from him when she found them and forbid them from seeing one another like a Capulet. She could lock Jon in his room during every free moment of the next ten years, and become a jailor worth fearing.

That would be the simplest option. It is also the wrong one.

The next most logical conclusion would be to blame the parents. If that other boy was trouble, he had to have gotten it from somewhere. Whatever they had done to him had clearly ruined something in him already. Changed him as much as Isaiah and Sarika had changed Jon by dying on him. Maybe Gerard’s parents were dead, too. Maybe that’s why he’s lost.

The conclusion that Miriam reaches is to be angry with herself. She should have demanded more answers instead of giving them the benefit of the doubt. She shouldn’t have pretended to believe that they would get on that bus.

Miriam pulls the list from the corkboard and sweeps out of her study. She leaves her coat on the hook and makes her way out the door, to drive around the city searching.

He could be anywhere. He could be safe and sound with his suspicious friend in an entirely harmless place, or he could be dead in the trunk of a car. He could be halfway across town by now, with the way he walks without stopping. He could be so many things all at once. This could be the day that he slips out of her grasp and she will have wasted time in chasing after him because she took five minutes at her desk to decide who to be angry at.

He’s such a _smart_ boy. Doesn’t he understand that the world is a dangerous place? _Why_ does he have to have that belief in false invincibility like other children whose parents _hadn’t_ died?

Couldn’t it have told him something about being more careful? Staying where it’s safe? About not climbing to the top of tall structures when they both know his palms tend to sweat, that his fingers don’t always grip tight enough, that he’s not always quick enough to catch himself? That no one is guaranteed to be quick enough to catch themselves, and that anyone can fall? That a doctor might not be able to save them when they do?

Miriam doesn’t wish him scarred and scared out of living. She wants him to _want to live._ To want it enough that he conducts his life someday with enough respect for the condition of the world that he can survive in it.

It’s too much to ask from a child. She’s impatient. It’s unfair to expect him to understand.

But he’s _such_ a _smart boy._ It’s all right there in the little faces he makes when he pulls a board book out of the charity pile before tossing it aside, reminding her that his mind is so far ahead of the curve that she has to run to keep up herself. It’s in the way his stutter all but disappears when he recites the complicated names of ancient dinosaurs like poetry, like he’s wildly in love with the puzzle of scientific Latin and wants all who hear it to love it, too.

Miriam listens to Jon tell stories about the way that a dinosaur’s life can be mapped out backwards by the trenches carved into their bones and she hears the voice of his father, the youth in it she remembers from so long ago. She looks into Jon’s shining black eyes and she is transported back in time so very differently than he says he wishes he could be. 

Jon wants to tame a Spinosaurus. Miriam wants her family back. She needs to keep what’s left of it safe. She needs him to let her.

But she can’t say as much. In no such words, at least. She can’t look him in the face and shake him and beg him to listen because she can’t let her fear get the best of her. He doesn’t need a withering old woman with terrified eyes watching his every move like he’s got his foot hovering over a landmine.

What he needs is “unshakeable.” What he needs is a pillar, fortified by age and experience against the toils of humanity’s hungry brutality, to set an example for him. He needs to see that where there is death and loss there are those who persevere. Who stand stone faced in the wake of trouble, and bark it off without opening their mouths. Effortless, like it’s easy. Like it’s the only way.

Miriam will be that person if it kills her. Until it kills her, as she is sometimes certain it will. She is also certain that regardless of the weight and power of self-made stone, she will try her hardest to kill it first. 

She does not wish her grandson scarred and scared of living. But she does wish that he had brought someone else home for his first sleepover.

Gerard is a terrifying child to stand in front of. There is something very wrong with the way he looks. It’s through no fault of his own, Miriam can see. No, that’s why it’s so chilling. That’s why she doesn’t believe Jon’s babbling lie about having called his parents on their own.

Gerard looks at her like she’s got a knife held behind her back, and so she makes a point to keep her hands visible at all times. Pressed to the table, offering plates, pinching splinters out of his palms with as much gentleness as she affords to Jon’s. He watches her like she is a spitting cobra, and so she chooses her words carefully. Plain and simple, calm questions, no clear verbal accusation.

He’s afraid of her and she can see it in his eyes. She doesn’t like the conclusions that his posture begs for her to draw. She hates the bruise on his cheek. She is loathe to question where he got it, and even more so to acknowledge why he might not feel like he can tell her.

Miriam cannot afford to be afraid for two children at once, but this is where she has found herself.

It isn’t until her third attempt at searching the park that she finds them. They’re on the swings together, and she can see from the distance that Jon is having fun. She stands at the gate and watches. With him in sight at last, the urgency boiling over inside of her starts to cool.

Jon is smiling. Gerard keeps his head down. Miriam thinks.

It’s peculiar for a child who is so obviously older to follow the cues and whims of an eight year old, and yet it’s very clear that Jon is in charge. He swings higher, his mouth is moving around constant words. Gerard just looks at him like he’s seeing the sun for the first time, and then looks away like he’s surprised by how much it hurts.

And then they spot her by the gate, and Gerard looks at Miriam like she has risen from the fires of Gehinnom to drag them there.

She cannot rescind the rigidity of her hands as she points at them and insists them over to her. Calling their names would have been impossible; she hasn’t unlocked her jaw since the moment she hung up with the school. She cannot risk shrill desperation in public. She cannot break the silence across such a distance yet. She needs time to remember her voice, and how to use it when she is both deeply afraid and far removed from it.

Jon approaches her like a dead man walking, and Gerard flanks him like a wolf. She reaches out a hand to grip Jon’s shoulder — desperate, she realizes now in full, to have him back in her grasp — and is mildly surprised when Gerard doesn’t try to bite it off. 

They are both quiet as she herds them to the car. She hasn’t remembered her voice just yet, and it seems that they have suddenly forgotten theirs.

Miriam doesn’t yell at her grandson. Not if she can help it. That isn’t how he learns. It had never worked on his father, either, and so she found other ways to express lessons and frustration.

What she has never scolded him for is skipping school. Lying to her face. Running off with strange, bruised and battered boys in the early morning as if the city of Bournemouth recognizes them as kings. His budding sense of arrogance has never reached this far, and the morning of searching hadn’t provided Miriam with the words to confront it.

Jon squirms in the backseat like he’s carsick. From the rearview mirror, Miriam can see how pale he’s become. The way he watches his own knees instead of the world outside the window like always. Her chest aches with love and apology that she can’t give him yet, trapped behind the blockage of everything else. Anger and fear twist like snakes inside of her and she thinks that, somehow, Gerard can see it.

When she glances at him in the mirror, he is staring directly at her. Not into the cross between their reflections, but at the back of her seat. Like he’s seeing through the leather and right through her back. Right at the snake dance happening in her rib cage, and trying to kill it with his eyes. She suppresses a chill, flexing her hands around the steering wheel.

Miriam has never been afraid of a child before, and she isn’t now. It still comes from being afraid _for_ him.

No child should have eyes like that. No child should radiate that kind of distrust. No child should know the kind of fear that she can feel clawing at her own back, like a voracious animal that had already picked him clean and still wasn’t satisfied.

There is something terribly wrong, and she cannot blame the children.

Perhaps that is why she has no words until they’re back inside the house. 

Jon is in tears before he’s even fully seated on the couch. He grips at the fabric of his trousers like it will tell him what to do, his breath rabbit-quick and shallow.

Her face feels stiff, voice stiffer when she demands to know what he had been thinking. Finally, the room trembles around her, shifting under her feet as blood rushes to her head.

The apologies tumble out of him like she had taken a letter opener to the side of a bag of marbles. They clatter to the floor and roll around her feet as he begs for forgiveness. She can’t afford to slip on them.

There are no more lies left in him, it seems. He tells her start to finish where they had gone after walking past the bus stop, and how they had been very careful not to talk to strangers. How he promises they were doing something productive, something they couldn’t do at school.

Miriam asks what it is that surpasses the value of his education, and he responds with incoherent sobs. He’s finished. She knows the signs of his meltdowns, and she hates herself for pushing him past them just to get answers out of him.

What typically comes next is deep pressure, but she stops short in approaching him. 

There is no room to gather Jon into her arms because Gerard has collected him into his own. The transition between him staring dead-eyed through Miriam as she spoke and pulling Jon fiercely to his chest is one she nearly misses, it happens so fast.

He keeps his back slightly turned to her almost in offering, but maintains a glare over his shoulder that stops Miriam’s lungs from accepting air. 

She can only watch as Jon curls desperately into this boy’s grip instead of hers, like it’s the safest embrace he’ll ever know. Like there is nothing at all unsettling about Gerard, and he feels protected as he shakes and cries.

Protected from her.

Miriam swallows back a blinding wave of nausea. She fights not to back herself up into the wall for purchase.

Protected from _her?_

An unnatural sense of guilt pours over her like a rain of oil. The look in Gerard’s eyes almost makes her wonder if she deserves it, if she had acted out of turn, if she had been threatening in some way. If she is the convict floundering for freedom after committing a crime.

But the longer she studies those eyes, the more clearly the terror in them shines. It’s the sort of silent terror that acts as a magnifying glass, distorting the proportion of every small action. Every word. Every reaching hand. Turns even the most well-meaning of intentions into plots to destroy, to manipulate. To hurt.

The only thing that she can do for him is to back away. She holds up her hands and drifts backwards towards the kitchen, battling the split and tear of her heart that only deepens with every step. The sound of Jon crying is never easy to hear. The sight of him huddling away from her is devastating at best.

And she cannot show it, lest she become the villain that Gerard seems to expect her to be.

What usually follows deep pressure is a cold drink. She can still do this. As the sound of water filling a glass resounds through the adjoining rooms, she hears Jon’s tears hiccup to almost a stop.

She walks back into the living room slowly, glass held out in front of her. Jon is rocking himself forward and back as much as the bind of Gerard’s arms will allow him. His hands flap in front of him like dizzy birds. Miriam crouches down beside the couch and waits for an indication that he can take the glass from her without dropping it.

Miriam pays attention to her grandson. She gives him their tall glasses when he’s like this because she had discovered that by the time it takes him to empty it, he is able to calm significantly. A smaller cup never quite carries him through. A fat mug with a handle, either. Besides, he likes to drink with both hands tight around the glass. She watches now as he goes nearly cross-eyed as he lines up his fingertips in a row, draining the water from it in hesitant gulps to the metronome beat they count silently together.

Gerard watches them both. When the water is all gone, Miriam reaches for the glass so that Jon can catch his breath without worry, and looks to the other boy looming over him. He looks back, his posture only somewhat less guarded now. His hand stays on Jon’s shoulder. 

Amidst her hurt and worry, Miriam finds herself in awe of him. In his hypervigilant misunderstanding of her intentions there is a ferocious protectiveness that she thinks she can understand. He might not know it, but they have both come to the mutual conclusion that Jon is to be kept safe at all costs.

They need to have a conversation.

“Jon, dear, why don’t you go have a lie down upstairs?”

Jon looks at her, his eyes big and round with shock. “I’m— A-Am I in trouble?”

“No,” Miriam decides. “I just want to speak with your friend alone for a minute or two.”

The lie down comes close after the drink of water anyway. This is not uncharacteristic.

Still, Jon turns to Gerard for approval. Miriam watches the way they grip at each other’s arms and wonders how long they’ve known each other. What happened to weld them together this way? What will it take to undo it?

Gerard nods. Jon responds quickly, and slides off of the couch. He lingers and dawdles for a moment, reluctance clear, until something seems to break in him and sets him off running for the staircase. Miriam listens to the ragged thump of him rushing up the steps, waits for the sound of his door closing. Gerard waits just as quietly, just as still. 

Together they play gargoyle and courtyard monument, he on the couch and Miriam still seated on her knees on the floor. Her joints will hate her for this, but she is not so old that she can’t take it. She will be a pillar.

With Jon gone, though, the ferocity in him gives way to something else. Miriam watches as his eyes shift now to the carpet’s edge, his arms loosened at his sides. Is he relaxing, or retreating into his mind? Miriam knows the answer. It makes her chest hurt.

“It was my idea to skip school,” he says suddenly, mechanical. “I made him do it.”

Miriam could laugh. “A valiant effort. I know my grandson and his bright ideas. Please, don’t lie to me right now.”

Gerard’s brow twitches. There is defeat in the drop of his shoulders.

Miriam clears her throat. She needs as much time to conjure questions as he probably needs to decide on answers. She has to move carefully from one topic to the next like scaling a cliffside.

“Can you tell me _anything_ at all about your parents? Is that who you live with?”

“I only have my mum,” he says.

“I’ll need her telephone number eventually. Better you give it to me now.”

She watches the colour drain from his face the way she watches the syrup fade to the bottom of a slushie whenever Jon forgets to readjust the straw. She takes a deep breath.

“It’s her number, or 999. Your choice.”

Another twitch in his expression. Almost a wince.

There is a telephone on the side table beside the couch. Miriam gives him time to think as she shuffles to pluck it from the receiver, walking on her knees back to a safe distance away from him.

The phone number leaves his mouth diced and whispered, and she punches it into the dialpad with patience. She watches his face as she presses the call button and lifts the phone to her ear.

The first ring resounds through the speaker loud enough for Gerard to hear it. Miriam knows because he flinches and grips messily at his knees. By the second ring he has grown significantly paler, and by the third she can see his chest stutter badly with a laboured breath.

Her thumb presses down on the end call button before that third ring even has the chance to decrescendo.

“Alright, enough of this,” she mutters, solely to herself.

She cannot admonish the boy in front of her. Not when he looks so stricken with terror that he may wilt and collapse at any moment.

Miriam throws the phone onto the cushion beside her, caring little for the way it bounces close to the edge. With a sweep of her hand it’s pushed far away from them both, face down against the arm of the couch. She wishes with every cell in her body that reaching out might do some good, but she knows with each and every one of them that it would not. Not only that, but she cannot even if it would; this is not her child. He doesn’t trust her, and she doesn’t know how to fix this.

Gerard relaxes slowly. Miriam watches as he stares at the crease between the wall and the ceiling in front of him, and realizes after a long moment that he is counting his own breaths in beats. He’s coaching himself into calm. He knows how to do that. Is he mirroring the way Jon had calmed himself just before, or does he have years of practice?

Miriam hates herself for ever digging for that number. The only good that may come out of having dialed it at all is that she can give it to the police when they become involved.

The police will have to become involved. Miriam knows that. She’s sure that Gerard knows that, too. She can see that he doesn’t want it any more than she does. How could he be this deathly afraid of calling his mother and yet _still_ find that more favourable than calling the police? Has it been done before? Have they failed him? Did their involvement only incur the wrath of his tormentor? Is silence his best defense?

The infinite number of possibilities scroll through her head in a dizzying litany. Miriam shakes herself out of it with a small cough. Gerard’s mousy hair is damp at his temples, and she thinks that only some of it is from a day of running around.

“I’m sorry,” she tells him. “That was… that was very wrong of me. I understand now. Will you let me get you a glass of water?”

Gerard wipes his hands on his trousers. After a moment, he nods.

It’s a bit of a struggle to get back to her feet, but Miriam manages. She picks up Jon’s glass from the floor and hurries back into the kitchen, exchanging it for a new one with fresh, cool water from the pitcher. Gerard accepts it from her easier than Jon does sometimes. His hands, almost surprisingly, shake less.

Miriam returns to her knees on the floor. Immediately, her legs start to scream at her in protest to the pressure she’s been putting on them. Slowly, cautiously, she tips herself over to lean on the edge of the couch, sliding her legs out from under her to tuck neatly at her side. 

Gerard doesn’t shy away from her as he sips at his water. Progress.

She should start with an observation, to prove to him that she sees him. That she _sees_ him.

“I get the feeling that you are a very brave boy, Gerard. You must be very tired from it.”

His hands twitch over his knees. Even now, he’s only proving her right. 

Miriam takes a calm breath. The world itself is not an ugly place, but she has known its darker side since long before she was even Jon’s age. She and that darkness have since been reintroduced to one another like distant family over and over again. 

The last time, she brought it home with her in a basket on her back, after sitting _shemira_ for Sarika until they laid her in the plot with both of their husbands. Jon was asleep, exhausted and so small in her brother-in-law’s arms, while her sister held the door open for them all, with promises to prepare the _seudat havra'ah._

Gerard looks like a haunted house that has never known the light of an oil lamp in all the years it’s been boarded shut. She’s suddenly struck with the painful awareness that he surely doesn’t know what Diwali is, and that it isn’t the season to show him.

“I want to be of help to you, so I need you to be brave for just a little while longer and tell me what I need to know. Then you can take a break from being brave. Does that sound alright?”

Rigidly, he nods again. Miriam has played this game before. This game of nods and shakes, of shifty eyes and wringing fingers. For all of her mastery at this game, she has never played it with a child she would be terrified to reach out and comfort. Who would reject it like her hands were molten, and who tells her as much with everything down to the tightness of his jaw.

“You’ve just run away from home, haven’t you?” she asks. A nod. “Where are you from?”

He whispers something that sounds like _London._ Miriam hums.

“That’s quite the trip to take all alone.”

She sees his mouth form the responding ‘yeah’ more than she hears him say it. This isn’t helping. She has to be direct, their mutual desire to rebel against it be damned. Miriam lowers her voice to its very softest, and most patient.

“Why did you run, Gerard? What’s so wrong about London?”

Gerard hesitates. He opens his mouth, and the wisp of a non-word that comes out could make Miriam weep if she hadn’t already decided long ago that she would die before she shed tears in front of a child. 

He is forcing her to make guesses. A great percentage of her mind had already known the answer, but some atom-small part of her soul had dared to hope against it. To hope that he really was just some stubborn brat trying to make a point to a well-meaning parent who was worried sick wondering where he’d run off to. Who missed and loved him, and who would work hard to make him trust that when he grew tired of his game and crawled home where he knew, deep down, that it had been safe the entire time.

No, Miriam has known from the start that that was wishful thinking. That was the easy thing to believe. It is clearly the wrong one.

“Does your mother treat you badly?”

Gerard’s silence is as powerful as any nod or shake of his head. Miriam does not want to know how Gerard’s mother treats him. She doesn’t need details to know that it has scarred him quite badly. Stolen something from him. Beaten something down in him, snatched the bulb out of a bright light.

No lamp had been lit for his comfort, but there is still a fire in him. She can see it.

“Is that bruise on your face new?” 

Nod. 

“Would you like to put ice on it?” 

Shake.

“How did it happen? Can you tell me?”

Gerard’s answer comes quicker than she had come to expect, steady with clear words and certainty.

“Someone was pushing Jon around in the park.”

Miriam struggles against the urge to recoil. “Who was?”

A shrug. “He won’t be a problem anymore.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what that means,” Miriam tells him clearly. “Did you frighten him off?”

Nothing at first. Then, “No. But he won’t do it again.”

Miriam folds her hands over her lap. “Did you step in to protect Jon, then?”

Nod.

“Thank you,” she says, and oh, how she means it. “You see? You’re as brave as I said.”

Gerard stares at the floor. Miriam gives him a moment, taking the silence to think on her own inability to be everywhere that her grandson needs her to be. On the fact that he had needed saving from something she didn’t know about. How Jon might never have told her himself.

Now is not the time to dwell on that. According to Gerard, the threat is ‘gone.’ She doesn’t know if she likes the way that sounds, but it will have to do for now. 

“He’s been treated bad.”

At this, Miriam blinks. Gerard is looking over her shoulder at something, maybe at nothing.

Miriam clears her throat. “Did he tell you that?”

“Don’t think he knows.”

Blood rushes back to her head with the force of a shot fired.

“Was it this person at the park?” she asks. The question is distant in her own ears.

“Yeah,” Gerard says firmly. “But not just that.”

Miriam feels something snap shut inside her. The cap to her windpipe, some valve in her heart, _something_ ices over and she freezes with it. Gerard is no longer staring distantly over her shoulder but directly into her face with such an intensity that she wants to fling herself backwards away from him.

There is an accusation in his eyes, expectation of something — a confession? Good lord, she could be sick — and Miriam can feel herself wither beneath it. Somewhere deep in her heart, there is a sense of true powerlessness.

“Not me,” she manages. The words are calm, but she has to clear her throat before she can force out anything else. Her hand rises to her chest, thumping softly over her sternum. “I lo— I love my grandson. I only want to keep him safe.”

She doesn’t need to justify her love for Jon to this eerie, haunting child. She doesn’t. But she does feel the need to prove to him that she is not a danger to either of them. Her heart is racing. She can’t let it show on her face.

Gerard seems to see it anyway. He watches her as she feels her expression twitch despite her efforts, stares as she does her best to compose herself. Like he somehow, _horribly,_ knows what pain looks and sounds like in other people, and is trying to decide if Miriam’s is genuine.

He sounds… approving, when he says, “I believe you.”

And then his eyes slip over her shoulder again, grey clouds sprawling across the ocean. Miriam’s heart stays racing.

It’s not hard to piece together that when Gerard says _he’s been treated bad,_ he also means _I’ve been treated bad._ When he demands her intentions with those eyes, he is asking her if she will turn on him.

Is this simply the only way that Gerard can safely reference himself receiving harm, or is she really missing something crucial? What of himself does he see in Jon? She wants to keep Gerard on track, to get to the bottom of his side of things and decide what to _do_ about him being here, but she cannot change the language he has chosen to speak.

“Thank you for telling me,” she says. “I’m going to do something about it.”

Gerard’s eyes don’t come into focus again when he asks, “Will you?”

“Yes,” is her quick answer. “Yes, I’m going to do the best that I can. For you both. Do you still believe me?”

He doesn’t nod this time, but he does manage a glance up at her face. Miriam will take that. She collects her hands over her lap to rub her palms together, sighing with finality.

“I’ve kept you long enough. Jon should have calmed down by now, if he hasn’t just been eavesdropping. You should go spend some time with him.”

Gerard blinks at her. “I don’t have to leave?”

The smile that Miriam feels flicker across her own mouth feels like kissing a sparking appliance. “No, dear. Not yet. You can take that break we agreed on.”

The eye contact that Gerard holds with her now brims with knowing. She doesn’t know how, but she can see in his eyes that he knows something. Too much that he shouldn’t know, things that she’s fought to keep off of her face. How lost she is. How trapped she is. How sad.

The moment that passes between them feels like a handshake between distant business representatives agreeing on a deadline. It isn’t cold, but it’s professional. Solemn. Gerard isn’t going to beg her for more time, but she isn’t going to take away what little of it she can afford to give him. He seems almost at peace with it. It just leaves Miriam feeling grim.

Miriam doesn’t think that this conversation can really be had aloud; she’s almost sure she’s imagining it, because how could a look hold so much inside it? How could a child his age be so clear headed about his own fate? She doesn’t even know exactly how old he is. She hadn’t asked his last name.

Too late now. Gerard is sliding himself off the couch, only wobbling for a moment before he gains his bearings. Miriam watches as he steps not towards the staircase, but around her and into the kitchen. There comes the soft sound of the glass meeting the metal basin of the sink as she hauls herself achingly to her feet, and then he is passing by her again empty handed.

“Thanks, dadi,” he says; quiet, chary-tongued — Sarika’s language, almost Jon’s. Not even one Miriam can claim enough for herself to know much beyond what _this word_ means. She goes still in her bewilderment, the weight of responsibility rushing into her chest like floodwater. 

For a moment, he turns to face her.

“He’s scared to go to school,” Gerard says softly. “I think you should start there.”

“Alright,” Miriam whispers. She might be frustrated by her own voice were she not so numb. As it stands, there is only faint surprise at the ease with which he had managed to break her down.

Like a breeze, he continues past her. Miriam smooths her skirt and watches him go, catching his eye one last time as he wheels around the bannister and starts up the steps.

When he’s out of sight, Miriam sways on her sore legs. She catches herself with one hand on the arm of the couch, eyes focusing now on the discarded telephone. She does her best not to slam it into the receiver when she puts it back where it belongs. It’s harder not to slam her study door behind her when she makes it across the house to shut herself inside.

Once alone, entirely alone, it’s not so difficult to fall heavy into her desk chair, to put her head down, and cry.

There are no children here with sad eyes to carve the core right out of her, to threaten her composure and keep her on her knees. There is no one in this room who needs her to be a pillar.

What she is left with is just the cruel knowledge that there are plans to be made. Decisions, efforts, meals, rules, calls.

She is going to have to make a call. Sooner or later, whether it be to Gerard’s wretched, nameless mother, or to a regimented force that she doesn't know if she can trust to take care of the situation cleanly. That may or may not make things worse for everyone involved. Could she be tried for this? Is this kidnapping? She has the phone number now, she should be calling and _calling_ until she gets an answer, and then telling the truth about his whereabouts.

But how can she?

How in creation can she do that?

It would be like abandoning Daniel to the lion’s den, but he would not be found blameless before G-d. Who would deliver him to safety if she were to leave him there? To hand him off straight into the waiting jaws of… what? _What_ would she be returning him to?

The question burns inside the paper nest of her heart. The pathetic, crumpled thing she had turned to for guidance when she felt the muscle of its original state begin to atrophy. That frightening, miserable, courageous child had struck a match over her, and in the rising smoke she can taste the promise of failure. 

She is going to fail this child, no matter what she does, and it burns.

Miriam lifts her head and wipes her eyes.

No. He may not have known what he was saying when he called her _dadi,_ but she felt it. 

Had Jon told him to call her that, or was he just insecure in a mimicry of _dadima?_ It should have been _dadi-ji,_ if anything. Just that one little sound dropped off from the end changes its meaning — that little measure of formality, fallen away into familiarity that Gerard could not possibly feel for her unless he were truly that desperate. Unless he were truly that alone. 

He doesn’t know the weight what he said. Miriam doesn’t know which of the children mixed the words up, but it doesn’t matter. What’s said is said, and she’s been given something to live up to until this is out of her hands.

She cannot answer that first ashen question without more information from Gerard, but she will be damned if she disturbs those children until dinnertime. She needs time to concoct a real course of action, a real justification for biding time. She has to make whatever transpires here believable, and she cannot let the children see how hard it is. She has to make it look effortless, like it’s easy. Like it’s the only way.

Miriam writes a new list. It contains every question Gerard raised in her about where to go from here, how much time she thinks she can give him, how much she will need to pull it off. It descends into questions about Jon; his fears, his pains, his secrets. When she gets everything out, she numbers them in order of what she thinks she can confront first, and then converts the messy list onto a new paper, starting from top to bottom by pertinence. 

The worst part is when logic tells her that Gerard’s suggestion for where to begin must come at the very end. What he doesn’t know can’t possibly hurt him any more than he already has been. It would be hard to describe that as a positive thing.

She has to deal with Gerard first, that is no question. If Jon’s fear lives in his school then this weekend will make little difference. Miriam doubts she will have much longer than that to tend to his friend, and even that feels like a stretch.

In that time, she will research. Perhaps call Katherine Ford, whose daughter Rachel is a social worker. She will keep to herself all of her machinations while she gives Jon and Gerard the weekend to recover from being brave, and when it is just the two of them again, she will confront Jon about his toils.

Her grandson, at least, will not be Daniel but Moses. Miriam will stand in the river until she knows he is safe from harm, perhaps someday able to forget the clutch of fear and suffering, if only for so long. She will bear it for him in the reeds, and he will be safe. She will make him safe.

Come Monday morning, she will be storming that school.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> long notes this time sorry!
> 
> i hope this rendition of her makes sense, like. i wanted to take jon's perception of her as an adult (who tends to blame himself and see the worst in things) and really open it up. i'm a firm believer that someone's intent does not outweigh the impact they have on other people, especially children, but he said himself she tried her best with what she had. i would imagine that she spent a lot of his childhood very afraid and then very reluctant to show it, which definitely contributed to jon's propensity to repress his negative emotions and take on a lot more than he should without asking for help. that matters. that scars. sometimes your best efforts backfire and even if you had done things differently, there would have been something else that leave equally as lasting marks. it's just the way it goes. very bittersweet.
> 
> but i refuse to give him a guardian who doesn't fight tooth and nail for him when he needs her. dadima's about to break some heads at that school, boy. granny smackdown.
> 
> on another note: i named her miriam as it means "sea of bitterness," but also for the biblical prophetess. can anyone tell me why i might have used the moses allegory at the end there? hahaaaa i love to die and be dead. 
> 
> i'm all about that epic foreshadowing. hope it translated 👁️ gerry got them big ol eyes himself. hoo.
> 
> catch me on tumblr @[gerrydelano](http://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/)! comments and feedback would be stellar ;; would love to hear any thoughts you guys have on this one!
> 
> _[edited on 8/27/2020; changing "nana" to "dadima" throughout; added a new scene in the end where she reflects on gerry calling her "dadi"]_


	5. copper-bottomed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What dadima does ask, however, surprises Jon into setting down his spoon.
> 
> “What do you think you’d like to do tomorrow?”
> 
> “...Do?”
> 
> Dadima blinks at him. “I was thinking that we should get out of the house. Do something fun. Go somewhere. Would you _rather_ stay in?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> check out [this beautiful fanart](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/190964946435/) by @nbvagabond on tumblr, based off of the final scene from chapter 4! i'm FLOORED and so so honored!!!!
> 
> EDIT 8/27/2020: made some MAJOR edits here, search for "matzah" and "chana masala" to find the scenes added.

_copper-bottomed - genuine; trustworthy; unlikely to fail_

───── ☆ ─────

Crying in bed loses its appeal very quickly. Jon only manages it for a few minutes before he finds himself carefully positioned halfway down the staircase with his head all but stuck through the banister poles, straining to listen to the conversation happening without him in the living room.

It’s hard when both dadima and Gerry are so quiet. Just barely, he registers dadima asking questions that Jon thinks ought to make him want to flee back up the stairs, but instead root him to the spot with an unbearable curiosity. His hands grip the banister poles until they slip a bit, the sweat on his palms from his earlier meltdown returning.

He wishes he could _see_ what’s actually happening. The lack of a visual gnaws at him, leaves him frustrated and lost. Jon needs to know what the both of them look like to know how he’s supposed to interact with them when they remember he’s here. He needs to know what’s going _on,_ or he won’t be able to do anything about it.

Jon had been planning to run back up the stairs by the time that Gerry was sent away from the living room, but the last thing that Gerry tells dadima before reaching the bottom of the staircase leaves Jon frozen where he sits.

Gerry spots him but doesn’t stop walking. Jon realizes by the time he’s three steps up that he’s gesturing for Jon to hurry back up the stairs in time with him, maybe so that dadima doesn’t find out he’d been sitting there the whole time. It probably doesn’t make a difference. Jon had heard her say the word _eavesdropping_ when dismissing Gerry in the first place.

Still, for the sake of Gerry’s improvised stride, Jon twists to get his hands on the steps and start crawling back up as close to soundlessly as possible. He leads the way back to his room and hovers by the door until Gerry steps inside after him, and fights the urge not to slam it closed.

Gerry doesn’t sit down on the bed, or on his blanket pile on the floor, or anywhere. Just stands in the middle of the room with his arms hanging at his sides again in that way that Jon doesn’t understand. If they had switched places, if Jon had just come from talking to dadima like that, he’d be clutching at himself like the house had been swept up and dropped into the Arctic ocean. 

Even now, having only been listening, Jon feels the goosebumps spreading up his forearms like some kind of disease. Once aware of it, he has no choice but to reach up and try to rub it away through his sleeves.

“Why would you tell her that?” he asks.

“Because you wouldn’t.”

Gerry says it so simply, like no other course of action existed. Jon wrinkles his nose.

“W-Well, of _course_ not. It’s not— I’m not _scared_ to go to school, I just—”

“Wish you could skip every day because your classmates don’t like you, you lose your money and starve, and your teachers do nothing to help.”

Jon’s hands clench into fists. One of them bounces off the door behind him when he snaps his arms back down. It doesn’t quite mirror the way Gerry’s arms still hang limp and resigned like those of a very sleepy marionette.

“None of that stuff _matters,_ though.” Jon resists the urge to stomp his foot, wiggling his knee to scare away the jitter building there. _“You_ ran away from home. That’s what she wanted to talk to you about, not about me.”

Gerry’s face doesn’t change much. It might be frustrating if Jon wasn’t already brimming with something unknowable and frantic. As it stands, it’s just hard to look away from him. Like if Jon were to stop watching closely he might miss the moment that Gerry expresses something more obvious than flat, numb sadness. Something that might give him answers.

“I think it matters.” 

Gerry’s voice is astoundingly level. Assured, but quiet. Jon stares at him.

It almost feels like Gerry had tattled on him for something. Jon can’t tell if it’s guilt or anger or fear he’s feeling, or something else. The lights in the room are still too bright. Maybe he hadn’t given himself enough time to really calm down. Maybe he’s rushing. Maybe it’s just not worth getting mad about.

It doesn’t look like Gerry wants to argue. Even if he did, it doesn’t really look like he could. Jon pouts at the floor.

“You really don’t think I can take care of myself?”

Gerry sighs. “You shouldn’t have to.”

Oh.

Jon drags his sleeve underneath his nose, sniffing. His legs don’t want to be holding him upright anymore. Decisively, he crosses over to his bed and climbs up on it, shoving his glasses up over his face to nudge them off and leave them overturned on the mattress near his head. Gerry’s shape is blurred, but he can see it when it crosses over to the desk chair to finally sit.

“You must think I’m a spoiled brat,” Jon mutters into his blanket as he pulls it around himself.

Gerry slings an arm over the back of the chair, rests his chin on it. “Not really.”

“You don’t have to start lying _now.”_

“I’m not lying. I’ve never asked for help, either.”

Jon peers over at him. He pushes the blanket down away from his mouth, frowning. “Not _ever_ until now? Really?”

Gerry tips his knees from side to side to swivel the desk chair in half-spins. “Not on purpose. And you kind of dragged me here, anyway. So, I guess… not ever, at all.”

Jon can’t tell if this means that Gerry is forgiving his stubbornness, or if it means that he’s terrible for not wanting help since he’s more or less holding Gerry hostage here. He buries his face in his blanket, his gushing sigh collecting in the fabric as an uncomfortable heat that makes him draw back again. Ugh.

Nothing is comfortable. He’s still in a finicky state of _squirm_ and _fidget._ Some part of him almost wishes the blanket could keep Gerry from seeing altogether, but he probably just looks like a really big caterpillar that can’t eat its way out of the cocoon.

Everything is giant bugs all of a sudden. It’d be nice to know when that’ll stop.

“Are you mad at me?” Gerry suddenly asks. 

Jon worms an arm out of the tangle he’s tied himself up in and pulls the edge of the blanket away from his face to look over. After a moment of thinking, he reaches for his glasses. Seeing Gerry’s expressions is more important than hiding.

“I don’t think so,” Jon decides. “Was I acting really mad?”

“Kind of.” Gerry is muttering against his own arm, still half-spinning in the chair. “Yelled some.”

Had he yelled? Why doesn’t he remember raising his voice? Jon rubs his nose again, clearing his throat.

“Um,” he starts. “I’m— I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I’m not mad.”

“Okay,” Gerry says, and then after a moment, “I’m not mad, either.”

“Hm?”

“I sort of yelled at you, too. On the roof.”

Had he? Why doesn’t Jon remember him raising his voice?

Well. It must not have been anything important. Especially if Gerry is saying he isn’t mad now. No one is mad at each other. Dadima isn’t mad at them, either. They’re not at school but safely at home, unpunished and also not eaten by any sort of giant bug. 

Jon doesn’t remember anyone raising their voice, but he is keenly aware that he keeps thinking of giant bugs and his stomach doesn’t agree with it. Neither does the way his limbs still want to shake and bounce and jiggle against the confines of this blanket. Messily, he kicks it off and flops onto his back, bouncing his heels off of the mattress to an imaginary drumbeat. That’s better.

“If neither of us are mad, then we should talk about something else. What were we doing before dadima found us?”

“Planning the story,” Gerry says. “You had a bunch of ideas.”

“Oh, _right!”_ Jon remembers most of those. He sits up all at once and draws his legs back in to cross them, scooting back against his pillows. “What dinosaur did I say we should use?”

Gerry’s face pinches. Jon doesn’t wait for him to say he doesn’t know any dinosaurs by name before he swings himself back out of bed to rifle around for his favoured encyclopedia. He slides it onto the desk in front of Gerry and reaches across him with both arms to flip through past the table of contents and to the first page with pictures on it.

“Pick the one you think would be most fun to draw.”

While Gerry flips through the encyclopedia, Jon hops over to his bookshelf again to find the large sketchbook designated for just drawings of dinosaurs. There are loose sheets of paper torn out from regular old school notebooks folded up in the very middle of it, from the times he’d lost himself in doodling theropods in the margins when he should have been doing his times tables. It’s as hard to stay organized as it is to stay focused, sometimes.

If Gerry has never drawn a proper dinosaur before, he should see some examples first. Jon doesn’t mind the idea of him drawing in his sketchbook, either. He can share.

When he steps back over to the desk, Gerry is staring thoughtfully down at something with a very long neck. Jon sets the sketchbook down and peers over his shoulder, crowding close enough that he’s all but fully leaning on his arm. Gerry doesn’t move, so it must be okay.

“That’s a Brachiosaurus,” Jon informs him, despite the name being written at the top of the page. “You can tell it apart from other sauropods because its front legs are longer than its back legs. And its nasal bones, look, see?”

Jon reaches to trace the ridges of the picture’s skull with his fingertip. “They go up over its eyes. Have you seen _Jurassic Park?”_

Gerry shakes his head. Jon withdraws so that he has room to plant his hands on his hips in dismay, head inclined and eyes wide.

“We _have_ to watch it, it’s the _best._ For the Brachiosaurus they based how it walked on a giraffe and an elephant mixed together with computer generation, but they used animatronics for its head when it _sneezes_ on a girl in a _tree._ It’s so _cool,_ a-and realistic, and—”

“Do people get eaten?”

Ah. Jon bites his lips together, pulls at the hem of his sweater.

“...Maybe a few people.”

Gerry doesn’t actually look like the idea of people being eaten in a movie scares him. Now he just looks sort of unimpressed. Jon heaves out a great sigh.

“We… we could watch _The Land Before Time?_ That’s a cartoon, there’s no blood or acid spitting or severed arms or anything like that.”

Now Gerry almost winces. Jon could just _hit_ himself. Right in the _face._

The VHS is on a shelf just under his television, small and square on a table by the foot of his bed. He doesn’t use it as often as most children his age, probably, but on restless nights he’ll sometimes put on a tape and let it run until he falls asleep to the static when it’s over. 

It hadn’t occurred to him to try that last night. As he loads the VHS into the player, he decides that it probably wouldn’t have helped much. It should help now, though, since Gerry is here and it’s still daylight and they could use some fresh inspiration.

“Maybe it’ll help you pick a favourite dinosaur,” he amends.

Jon is fairly certain that Gerry will choose Cera as his favourite character. She’s tough. Not to mention, she’s Littlefoot’s first friend. The whole story starts with their accidental adventure, and they have to find their way to the only safe place at the end of the world. Make new friends to help get them there.

It’d be nice if Gerry wasn’t just his first friend, but the first of a few they could make together. That’d be really, really nice.

Jon talks through most of the film, explaining the real names for each dinosaur despite the nicknames the movie gives them, and to his pleasant surprise, Gerry talks back. Makes comments. Asks questions. Doesn’t tell him to be quiet. They snicker at the way the longnecks sleep standing up with their chins on each others’ backs, and Gerry leans over to plonk his head onto Jon’s shoulder blade. It only lasts as long as it takes to form a private joke, and it’s more than enough to make Jon’s heart about explode in his chest.

When the rocks give way into the big underground and Littlefoot’s mother is suspiciously offscreen for the duration of the dividing quake, Jon remembers all at once that he’d somehow forgotten that this scene was coming. He’s watched this film so many times by now that he doesn’t cry his way through it anymore. He never really understood why it helped him feel better to see Littlefoot go through that loss, but maybe it was because he makes it to the Great Valley despite it all. 

Still, Gerry’s arm comes around to curl over Jon’s back like he’s decided that since hugging him has worked twice so far, it must be the right thing to do from now on.

“Why do even the fun movies have to have this stuff in it?” Gerry asks when the scene ends, reclaiming his arm.

Jon sniffs. “To show that even when bad things happen, you can get the good ending. I suppose. There’s no good without the bad, right? If you don’t fight for it, then what’s the point?”

Gerry shrugs a shoulder. “I guess. Does anyone else die?”

“Just the Sharptooth.”

“Oh, good.”

Jon laughs at that.

By the time the film is over, Gerry has decided that he does like three-horns quite a lot. It’s perfect, because Jon has also decided that the boy in their story was going to have to also uncover a young caveman who was actually in charge of the dinosaur army first and understood how to coexist with them. Gerry gives him a look, and he makes a point to ignore it.

“Cavemen weren’t actually around when dinosaurs were,” Jon explains. “But since this is fiction, it’s okay. We have creative license.”

Gerry is in agreement until the topic of names arises. Nonsensical caveman noises don’t leave them many options. By the time the word _Grulk_ is set loose into the world, Jon is too dizzy with laughter to remember whose fault it was. Gerry can’t even repeat the sound without gasping. He buries his face in the blanket to drown out the giggles, and Jon is left to crumple onto his back in the vain hope of catching his breath before he ends up needing his inhaler.

They settle on just calling the character Cavekid and agree that his primary companion had been a triceratops. Gerry likes the idea of hiding behind its frill like a shield, knowing that its horns are lethal and at the ready but that it’ll only ever eat plants and mind its own business.

They’re on their third page of outlining when dadima knocks on the door. She glances between them and the notebook they’re scribbling in, the static on the television that they’ve left on, and clears her throat.

“Still no answer,” she tells Gerry. “I’ll try again in the morning.”

Jon looks over at Gerry, whose grip on his marker has gone stiff. He holds long eye contact with dadima and Jon can’t understand what the look on his face says any more than he can understand the look on hers. When he catches her attention himself, she squints a bit.

“In the meantime, I’ll be putting on supper. Matzah ball soup tonight.”

Jon claps his hands once, turning to Gerry with a knock of his elbow into his shoulder. “You’ll like that if you haven’t had it. It’s simple.”

“I’ve had that before,” Gerry whispers. “In diners sometimes.”

“Oh, good!” Jon sighs in relief. “That makes sense. Nobody’s too goyische to know matzah ball soup.”

“Jon,” dadima starts to say, but in the shadow of the hall, he thinks he sees her stifling a smile.

Gerry looks a little confused. He still has more trouble talking to dadima at all than he has had talking to Jon about dinosaurs. With some guidance and prompting, he agrees that he’s looking forward to the soup.

“You have some time before it’ll be done,” she sighs. “Before then, I expect you each to tidy up. Your hair is filthy. Gerard, do you have clean clothes left in that bag of yours?”

Gerry withers a bit. He mumbles something about his pyjamas still being clean, at least, which Jon repeats at a louder volume for dadima to hear. She tuts, and shakes her head.

“Well, you can put those on after washing up. I won’t touch your bag myself, but when you both manage to emerge from your crafting, put your dirty clothes in the hamper. Jon, you’ll show him where it is?”

Jon nods quickly, rocking where he sits. He has things that could use a wash, too.

“Very well,” dadima says, agreeable, before she takes a step into the hall again.

“Wait!” Jon chirps. “Can we have milk chai after? Gerry, you liked that, right?”

Gerry looks embarrassed for a moment before he looks back to dadima, back to the floor again to nod his head. Jon gives a stronger nod directly at dadima, and she nods back.

“Of course,” she says, probably so Gerry knows she was paying attention even though he wasn’t looking at her. Finally, she backs out the door and closes it gently behind her. 

Jon lets out a gushing breath. Gerry is scribbling slowly in the notebook, dragging the tip of his pen along the ridges of the metal rings. 

Now that dadima has said something about their hair, Jon compulsively reaches up to touch his own as he studies the way that Gerry’s falls around his ears. He hadn’t even realized that they’d let themselves get so untidy. What he’s realizing instead is that he is taking an awfully long time to realize some very obvious things.

Their book is thoroughly outlined before they decide to split up and be quick about cleaning up. Jon takes the upstairs washroom while Gerry agrees to just go back downstairs, since he’d left his bag there and all. By the time that Jon gets back downstairs with his own personal hamper, Gerry is sitting on the couch in his pyjamas. He doesn’t protest when Jon reaches for his rucksack to just drop all the clothes in the hamper himself. It must not bother him for Jon to be the one handling his belongings.

There isn’t much in the bag aside from a smaller bag of money and the torch that Gerry had been holding onto in his sleep. Jon doesn’t really know how far he thought he was going to get with such paltry supplies. There isn’t even a second pair of shoes, or a proper coat. It makes Jon nervous. He puts it out of his mind as he puts everything in the washer, not intent on waiting for dadima to do it when he knows how to measure detergent and softener himself.

Dadima doesn’t ask any probing questions during supper. Jon almost wonders if it’s because she doesn’t want him to hear. Does she think he’s not mature enough to handle the topic, or the truth? He hopes it’s just because she’s giving Gerry a break. Judging by the way that Gerry starts slumping at the table again halfway through the meal, Jon is certain that a break is the very _least_ he needs. He’s never seen someone get so sleepy so fast.

What dadima does ask, however, surprises Jon into setting down his spoon.

“What do you think you’d like to do tomorrow?”

“...Do?”

Dadima blinks at him. “I was thinking that we should get out of the house. Do something fun. Go somewhere. Would you _rather_ stay in?”

Jon might have shaken his head if she hadn’t asked it like that. Ribbing at the way that he can hardly ever find it in him to stay put even when he isn’t given a choice. He pokes at his matzah and thinks. Being put on the spot makes it harder to decide, perhaps especially since he’s still adjusting to the fact that he isn’t being punished for skipping school. This feels almost like… a reward for doing something wrong, which doesn’t make any sense. He needs to make sense of it before he can answer.

Besides, Gerry should pick. One look at him tells Jon straight away that he’s just as dumbfounded by the question, if not more.

“I’ll give you the night to think about it, then,” dadima says eventually. “Try to come up with something by morning. And do try to be reasonable, Jon. Within an hour’s drive.”

Jon nods, puffing his cheeks full of air. There are a lot of things that he would rather think about than the weird little scribble of uncertainty wiggling around in his stomach. Worms all tied in knots. When he starts thinking about how tying worms into knots would just kill the worms, he almost considers giving up on his soup.

What would she consider reasonable right now? She’s taken him to the museum plenty of times, but sometimes he can see that she wants to leave sooner than he does. She’s brought him to the waterfront, but not often, because she doesn’t like the smell of the ocean and she especially hates if he tracks sand into the car. She _does_ things with him, but there are times that Jon can’t help but feel that she would rather not.

“H-How about ice cream…?” he suggests, glancing to Gerry. “What’s your favourite?”

Gerry thinks on that. Jon _really_ hopes he’s at _least_ had _ice cream_ before. It’s a relief when he answers, “Any kind with pieces in it.”

“Like cookie pieces, or fruit?”

Gerry shrugs. “Either. Both?”

“I like plain ol’ Mr. Whippy,” Jon sighs, dropping his cheek down next to his bowl. “But the Flake is too crumbly.”

“Jon, head up off the table,” dadima says, before she nods serenely. “Ice cream is doable. Anything else?”

Jon lifts his head to blink at her. “Anything else?”

Her eyebrows rise high. “Yes, Jon. We can do something bigger than that, if you feel up to it. Make a proper day out of it.”

“Really?”

Dadima glances at Gerry in what Jon thinks looks almost like discomfort. “As I said, you don’t have to decide right this minute. You could also just pick what you want for dinner.”

He chews his lip for a moment before kicking his feet under the table. The request is halfway up his throat before it slips backwards, and he has to cough it back out.

“I know it’s not bebe night, but could we make chana masala?”

“Bebe night…?” Gerry repeats. Jon kicks his feet again, wobbling in his chair.

“Every year on my bebe’s birthday, we make all her favourite foods she was so good at. Chana masala, biryani, dahl with rice. And paneer! That’s cheese you can make really fast, you don’t have to wait for it to get old and mouldy. I like squishing the curds.” He bounces in his seat. “Dadima, can we make paneer?”

“I think we have enough milk for that.” Dadima nods, and then half-smiles. “No saag to go with it?”

Jon sticks out his tongue. “It’s too gooey, you _know_ I hate saag.”

“You like raita just fine,” she counters, primly spooning broth into her mouth. Jon rolls his eyes. 

“Yogurt and spinach are different _kinds_ of gooey.” He sighs, twisting to face Gerry. “Raita is fancy cucumber yogurt you’re supposed to eat with chana masala, and naan, which is _different_ than parathas even though they’re both bread.” Now he gasps. “Dadima, we never made challah! We have to show Gerry challah! With raisins!”

Gerry looks bewildered once again, eyes bouncing between the two of them. Dadima sets her spoon down to fold her hands, lips pursed as she thinks.

“We’re not feeding a militia,” she reminds him. “There’s only the three of us. Pick one special main dish to start, and we’ll pick the rest to go along with it.”

“Gerry, what do you like better? Chicken and rice or chickpeas?”

Bewildered becomes terrified and blank at the same time. Jon doesn’t think it’s because of the food, but being given the choice. Gerry shakes his head minutely, gestures to Jon with his empty spoon to pass the decision back to him. Jon laces his fingers to lay his forearms against the tabletop, face turned up to the ceiling as he thinks.

“Chana masala,” he concludes. “We make biryani more often.”

Dadima doesn’t sigh like he expected her to. “Because biryani is _much_ faster. We would have to go to the store before we could start anything tomorrow, if you want to have the cholai done before nightfall.”

Jon nods. “We could do it! I think it’s worth it. It’s special.”

He remembers, somehow, bebe making chana masala herself. She doesn’t spend a lot of time in his memories as a clear image, but the smell of it brings her back enough that he can almost see her. How her hair was so long he could reach the end of her braid while she stood cooking, even so low to the ground as he was when he was five. She tipped her head back to let him tug on it, pretended to sink like a battleship onto the tile to wrap him up and roll.

Making chana masala with dadima is different, but it’s still good. Plus, he thinks Gerry will actually like it. Better than _saag,_ anyway.

“Alright,” dadima agrees. “Chana masala it is. We’ll make raita and naan, too.”

“And paneer?”

Dadima raises an eyebrow, but not at him. At Gerry, this time, as she asks him a question.

“Would you like to try making all this with us? I could give you a job to do for each thing, and we can work together.”

Jon looks to Gerry with big eyes, awaiting enthusiasm he knows won’t quite come. Gerry’s spoon hovers as his hand goes still, broth sloshing down from around the bit of matzah he’d scooped up. After a moment, he nods.

“I’ve never made cheese at home before,” he admits. “It sounds fun.”

“It is!” Jon grins. “I’ll even let you squeeze the curds. Dadima, what about the challah?”

“How about we save that for Sunday?” she suggests. “That way, we don’t run out of things to do.”

“But it’s already Shabbat!” He turns to Gerry again, swaying in his seat and gesturing to their soup. “Challah is Jewish bread, it goes more with this anyway. _Technically,_ we should be making it _right now.”_

Dadima laughs. “Right now? It’s close to your bedtime.”

“It’s a weekend,” Jon counters, crossing his arms. “No school tomorrow.”

“No school today, either.” Her brow quirks with the corner of her mouth. “Hasn’t your day been long enough?”

Jon shrugs, pressing his arms down on the anxious flutter in his stomach at the reminder of what he’d done. “It might make us all feel better.”

She glances to Gerry again, so Jon does the same. Answering questions has been hard for him all evening, Jon thinks, so it might not be fair to ask another one just now.

_“I_ think it’d make us feel better,” Jon repeats. “I’ll teach you how to braid it, okay?”

Gerry nods more quickly this time, and actually speaks up. “Okay, sure.” 

Jon’s hands flap in celebration for a moment, spoon clattering into his bowl. Dadima inclines her head at him when they stop, nodding for him to finish eating. He obeys with shrugged shoulders, eating a little faster now to make time move faster.

They have just enough raisins left for one loaf of challah, with a few left over to snack on while the dough rises. Jon leads Gerry to the couch while dadima checks the pantries and cupboards to write a grocery list out of what’s missing, running upstairs for a sketchbook to bring back down. 

Every time Gerry flinches awake to apologize for dozing, Jon reminds him that it’s actually encouraged to sleep a lot on Shabbat. He himself is just restless, filling up pages with dinosaurs he remembers from _The Land Before Time._ Dadima hums as she crosses between the kitchen and her study, the house just quiet enough to hear her no matter what room she’s in.

She brings each of them a mug of milk chai when it’s almost time to braid the dough. Gerry wakes under her shadow with a start, but the warm drink seems to soothe him. Jon leans against his side as he sips his own, the sketchbook open over their laps so he can show Gerry the drawing he’d done of Cera for him. Gerry borrows his pencil and draw a Little Foot next to her before he starts trailing swirls and boxes again, curious plumes of mathematics. Jon watches with mellow intrigue until dadima calls them back to the counter.

Gerry’s hands aren’t as steady while braiding the dough as they are when he’s drawing, but they seem fine when he brushes the egg white over it. Jon can’t fathom why he seems so nervous. By the end of it, though, there’s a shy sort of smile on his face, so Jon considers his plan to be a success.

Dadima lets them take a few slices upstairs in paper towels as long as they promise not to get crumbs everywhere, and to brush their teeth before bed. Jon balances both of their shares on his sketchbook to climb the stairs so Gerry can hang onto the banister. 

Gerry makes immediate headway towards the desk chair to sit, but he’s entirely too sleepy to draw any decent dinosaurs, doodling aimlessly on scrap paper and nibbling slowly at his challah. Jon focuses on finishing his outline. If he doesn’t get it done now, it’ll keep him up all night.

It’s a while before Jon registers the silence in the room and looks up from his writing to see that Gerry has lain his head down in the crook of his elbow, the tip of his marker trailing off the side of the paper. That settles that. Jon closes his notebook and stacks everything on his bedside table, his glasses folded up on top. He pads over to the desk to shake Gerry’s arm.

“You’ll fall asleep _anywhere,”_ he mutters when Gerry stirs with a hum. “That’s really bad for your neck, I think. Come on.”

When Gerry moves to sit down on the blanket still on the floor, Jon tugs on his arm again. Gerry doesn’t go as rigid as Jon thinks he might have if he were more awake, but his forehead does crease in confusion. Jon shakes his head, gesturing to his bed.

“We both fit before.” He shrugs. “Floor’s bad for your neck, too.”

And bad for his brain, probably. The sheet probably didn’t help as much as he hoped it would last night. Even just standing next to the bed, Jon feels a creeping nervousness like a draft from underneath it. Must be because the sun’s gone down. The lamp being on doesn’t distract near enough from the darkness outside the window.

Gerry bends down to pick the blanket up off the floor and swing it around himself like a cloak. Jon doesn’t stop him from digging his torch out of his bag before he clambers up onto the mattress to scoot himself tightly against the wall. Jon leaves the lights on. When he curls up under his own blanket, he finds himself pleased by the way it pulls tighter around him with Gerry’s weight pinning it down on one side.

“Do you have any ideas for tomorrow?” Jon whispers.

“No,” Gerry whispers back. “I don’t know what’s around here.”

“Didn’t you ask about how far the beach was? That’s close.”

“You remember that?”

Jon frowns. “Yeah. I remember things.”

Gerry’s blanket rustles a bit with his responding shrug. Jon watches the way he holds his torch in front of him, thumb rolling over the switch.

“Have you never seen the ocean before?”

“Never get to really _see_ it. Just pass by, when we travel.”

Jon grumbles. “We’ll go to the pier. Dadima will just have to deal with the sand.”

Gerry makes a little noise, just shy of a faint snort. He hasn’t opened his eyes since getting settled. Jon can’t quite get himself to shut his.

“I think we can pick one more thing,” he says. “Something you really haven’t done before. Maybe for the morning, right after we start the chana masala. It has to cook _all_ day.”

“A day’s not that long.”

“It is when you’re soaking cholai,” Jon huffs. “We should do as much as we can while we wait and really make the best of it.”

He watches Gerry’s brow twitch again, like he’s stopping himself from wrinkling his nose. Okay. So, maybe too much would just ruin it. Maybe ice cream and the pier and not-really bebe night is enough. Maybe trying too hard to make this weekend special will just make it feel worse when it ends.

The smudges in his memory don’t completely obscure the truth of how temporary this is. He doesn’t press again when Gerry doesn’t respond, letting the silence settle and pressing his face into his blanket. He only looks up again when he feels the trembling.

Does that happen every time Gerry tries to settle down and sleep on purpose? Had he been shaking last night, stuck on the floor like that next to the cavern under the bed after— after—

It was yesterday, that’s right. They had only met yesterday. They had met at the park yesterday, and someone had died in front of them. They had come back here and managed to wake up this morning like nothing had happened, except something had happened. Something had happened that led him to skip school — not _them,_ because Gerry doesn’t go to school, because things have happened to him. Something happened to make dadima offer to take them somewhere special tomorrow like it was all they’d ever get. She’s acting out of character because something had happened.

Something had happened, and whatever had been happening to Gerry beforehand was still happening, too.

Jon had almost slipped into the notion that today had been a good day, but thinking back, he isn’t so sure that’s right. A cartoon and a few hours spent drawing and a mug of milk chai hadn’t done away with the awful truth. Maybe tomorrow won’t, either. Time is moving so _slowly._ Time is moving slowly and he’s forgetting to remember such little, simple things, and Gerry is still shaking because something _happened to him._ To them. Something happened, and it won’t go away.

That won’t stop Jon from trying to get rid of it.

They might not be able to throw the truth into the ocean tomorrow and watch it sink, but he can still reach across and wrap his fingers around Gerry’s wrist. He can hold on until the trembling stops. He can do that, and Gerry lets him.

───── ☆ ─────

The pier is moderately crowded, but it’s not so bad. There are still plenty of unoccupied viewfinders along the boardwalk. Dadima insists that they finish their ice cream before they touch anything covered in ocean salt and strangers’ handprints. 

They had both chosen cones, and Jon had pulled the Flake out of his to stick it in the other side of Gerry’s. They’ve discovered that he doesn’t mind the way they crumble, and they make great vampire fangs. Luckily, only one of them hits the ground when he smiles too big for them to stay in. The other is clumsily caught against the front of his shirt, and sneakily eaten behind dadima’s back before she can curl her lip in disgust. She does, however see the stain after it’s gone and make her displeasure with it known by sitting down on a bench and waving Gerry over so that she can scrub at his shirt with a napkin.

Gerry looks at Jon like he’s pretty sure dadima’s grown three heads, and Jon surmises that it’s because his mother has never licked a napkin before trying to wipe something off his clothes. Jon tries not to snicker while he endures it. It’s lucky his shirt is black. Less of a mess.

Dadima stays on the bench when they decide to go onto the beach. They leave their shoes with her, and she insists that Gerry roll up his trouser legs before they go. He cuffs them just above the ankle. He stands still when dadima bends to roll the left side one more time, but when she reaches for the right, he steps backwards.

Jon insists on carrying the bag they’d stuck his old kite in, but Gerry’s taken possession of the blue pail and shovel. Dadima had given them the Polaroid camera to carry around after sticking a fresh cassette of film inside.

“Stay where I can see you,” she instructs. “And _please_ don’t come back soaking wet.”

Jon promises for them both. Gerry lets dadima give the cuffs of his trousers a quick tug to be sure they won’t just unravel the minute they take off running. Jon doesn’t plan on running, though. He wants to take his time. There’s a while yet before sunset, and he doesn’t want anyone to get bored before Gerry gets to see the way the sky changes colour over the water in person. 

Gerry comes to stand over him when he crouches in the sand to dig around. “What are you looking for?”

“Shells,” he sighs. “Or beach glass. I want to give something to dadima.”

To say thank you, of course. He knows she really _doesn’t_ like being on the beach. She’s got a book to read, but she’s probably still bored. Giving her something pretty to keep is the least he can do to make it up to her, especially considering the meal they’ll be going home to.

Gerry crouches down to help him look. They chatter and compare findings until the sound of the ocean slapping the shore takes over all the other sounds in Jon’s head. One minute Gerry is right beside him and the next he’s yards and yards away, and it occurs to Jon that he’s the one who had drifted off. Oops.

When Jon returns to him and drops to his knees in the sand, he almost makes a reach for the pail to drop his treasures in before he realizes he shouldn’t. Gerry is trying to carve something into the shore, but Jon can see it’s not quite wet enough. It occurs right then that he could have been dropping the shells and beach glass into the kite bag the whole time. Brushing his hands off, he reaches for the pail and brings it over to the water to fill it and haul it back. Gerry jolts a bit when he dumps it out in the sand next to where he’s working, just shy of scandalized.

“It won’t stick like that,” he declares. “You gotta pack it in really tight to make it stay, so it’s gotta be wet. What are you making?”

“It was gonna be a fish, but its eyes were weird.”

They decide to start over and make a turtle. Gerry does most of the sculpting while Jon’s major contribution is more in the way of words about the turtle’s great ancestors, and running back and forth to refill the bucket. 

Gerry takes great care in his carving, brushing loose bits off of the notched shell as if it were real and alive. It could look it, if they covered it in seaweed like papier-mâché. A story spills out of Jon’s mouth about how it could get up and crawl into the water when they turn their backs on it. Gerry thumbs gently over its eye and thinks it over. Says, “I hope it does.”

They dig out more space around it and try again with some small fish to swim imaginarily alongside it. Gerry’s look pretty good. Jon’s look more like sea cucumbers, or so he says before Gerry asks what those even look like and he fails to come up with an answer other than ‘lumps, mostly.’

When it’s done, Jon takes pictures. Not so many that he runs out of film, but enough to get it from all the good angles. He hands them to Gerry and tells him to shake them out as he takes more, and they get tucked safely into the front pocket of the bag when they’re done.

Gerry’s never flown a kite before, either. Once Jon shows him how to do it, it stays up in the air until the evening starts changing colours, violet and rose shining through the nylon. Jon carries their belongings while Gerry lets the kite pull him down the beach, his eyes so focused on where it presses up against the sky that his footsteps waver into the lapping tide. 

A breaker splashes up against his legs before he hears Jon warn him away from it and he jumps back like a cat caught off guard, the kite string slipping from his grasp. The weight of the spool drags along the sand and keeps it close enough that Gerry can dive for it before it’s lost forever, but he just about ends up on his hands and knees in the water for it. 

This time, he manages to scramble away before the next wave breaks. His breathless laughter gathers in Jon’s chest like a mess of parakeets, swarming at the door of their cage as it’s pulled open from the outside. Jon lifts the camera from the strap around his neck to snap another picture.

It occurs rather late that dadima’s bench is but a speck in the distance, and they should at least drift back over to their turtle if not back to her entirely. She’s probably done with her book by now. She’s probably a moment away from getting up to hunt them down herself.

“Think she’ll be cross with me for coming back soaking wet?” Gerry asks on their way back. He’s traded the kite for the bag and pail. Jon shrugs.

“She’ll fuss over you, more likely. We can say you fell over.”

“I _did_ fall over.”

“So it’ll be the truth!” A string of giggles fades in Jon’s mouth. “I don’t think she’d be cross with you either way, though.”

“Would she be if it were you?”

Jon considers this, lowering his hands to his stomach. He’s wrapped the kite line around his hand enough times that he doesn’t have to keep a constant grip on it.

“It’s not like she gets mean when no one’s looking,” he explains. “I just think she wants to make a good impression on you, since you’re a guest.”

Gerry doesn’t respond right away. Jon squints against the last slivers of the setting sun to look up at his face. It’s hard to see what’s there, so he doesn’t dwell on it.

“She really isn’t bad,” Jon says. “I’m making her sound bad, aren’t I?”

“No,” Gerry sighs. “I just wish she’d bring you here more often.”

Mm. Well, that, Jon can agree with. Though, the beach is never this much fun on his own.

“We’ll come back here,” he decides. “You, too, I mean.”

Gerry doesn’t say anything to that, either. Before they start up the incline to drier sand that leads back up to the boardwalk, he stops to face the ocean and watch as the last of the sun disappears below the horizon. 

Jon steps a bit ahead of him before turning around to wait, and counts to nine before reaching out for his arm.

“Come on,” Jon urges. “We have to go pull the cinnamon stick out of the chana masala.”

After another long, silent moment, Gerry allows himself to be pulled towards the pier, but he doesn’t take his eyes off the water until there is no more light left to dance across the surface.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you know life is hard when the beach episode is laced with preemptive nostalgia and longing for something _not_ to happen! also dissociative disorders are a blast, huh. love the onset of repression and amnesia. love that for them (i don't.)
> 
> feel free to comment with any little references you might have caught in the narration >:-D 
> 
> catch me on tumblr @[gerrydelano](http://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/) as always 🤙
> 
> _[edited on 8/27/2020; changing "nana" to "dadima" throughout; added some food talk before dinner, and DURING dinner!]_


	6. high and dry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Okay, so something else.” Jon sounds remarkably calm for a moment, even speaking through his own tears. “Run away again, but better this time. Pack more than three sandwiches, and warmer clothes. I have a big luggage bag from our last trip to Israel, I’ll—”
> 
> “Don’t,” Gerry interrupts. “It won’t work.”
> 
> “—I’ll come, too, and that way I don’t have to go to school _and_ you don’t have to go home. We could find—”
> 
> “Jon—”
> 
> “—with no monsters, a-and it won’t matter that we don’t have parents because—”
> 
> _“Jon!”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> check out [this cover art](https://twitter.com/goomi_yamama/status/1235342849929089024?s=19) by @goomi_yamama on twitter! aaaah!
> 
> **CWs in the end notes**

_high and dry - stranded; without the hope of recovery_

───── ☆ ─────

Dadi is no better a liar than Jon is. 

While he and Jon eat lunch at the table, Gerry watches her lift the telephone with her thumb already poised over the end call button. Watches the subtle flex of her hand as she presses it before the speaker reaches her ear. She holds it there as if she’s listening to it ring, and Gerry can hear that it isn’t. She keeps her back to them, and waits a good long while before she turns around and says, “The line is busy. I’ll try later.”

She sets the phone facedown with almost a smack, slides it away from her as if she’d pulled it out from the oven and not away from her own face. Does a lie make the very air you breathe all that heavy? It looks that way for Jon, the way his chest heaves like the trap around the struggling animal of his panic. It looks that way for dadi, when she frowns like she’s burned her mouth on something scalding.

It’s Sunday afternoon, and she’s still pretending to make phone calls to his mother. It’s Sunday afternoon, and his mother still hasn’t intervened. It’s Sunday afternoon, and there is a heavy, dreadstone feeling in Gerry’s stomach that says this is the last time.

The last time he will ever sit next to Jon at his kitchen table, dipping fresh grilled cheese sandwiches into the same bowl of hot tomato soup. The last time he’ll wear clothes that smell like this brand of detergent, or Winnie the Pooh plasters from another person’s first aid kit. The last time that he will be lied to out of mercy.

Gerry is pretty sure that’s what this is. He knows malice, and he knows it must have an opposite. He knows by now that dadi does not look at him the way his mum does, not how anything with too-many too-little eyes do, and so must have different intentions. Her false calling is not a taunt, a toy, another inch of water in the well he’s chained into. She’s rejecting her role by playing it while they can see her. She’s telling the truth in her refusal to.

He doesn’t think he’s ever met a liar with his best interest in mind. It’ll probably never happen again.

Dadi lets them run off again. Says she’ll call them down when it’s time. Time for supper, Jon assumes. Gerry wonders if he’s accepted, too, that it’s the last one.

The dinosaur book finds itself done in a matter of hours. Jon has plenty to say about Gerry’s inconsistent handwriting around the little practice doodles he’s been doing in the back of Jon’s sketchbook, and so he insists on writing out the story itself, first in pencil and then over in clean marker. That’s fine. Gerry can colour as well as he can draw. He knows how to shade things with a darker shade of the same colour, and save black for bold guidelines.

They each take charge of different pages until it’s time to bind them together; Jon runs down to dadi’s office to borrow her hole puncher, and Gerry lingers behind to wait. Lingers and waits and hides but doesn’t hope, not really. Jon comes thumping up the stairs so fast that he’s winded by the time he gets back through the door. Gerry is tasked with threading blue embroidery floss through the holes, tying them just loosely enough that they won’t rip with every page turn. Tight enough that they’ll stay.

Jon flinches at the knocks delivered to his bedroom door and Gerry’s hand is around his forearm before dadi pokes her head inside to tell them to come downstairs. Jon’s recovery is as swift as his rise to his feet, the book brought up with him and thrust into her hands for her to read first. She steps inside and holds it under the lamplight, studying the cover first.

Gerry watches from the floor as she flips through the pages, trails her fingers along the wax of crayons that they only used on the plants in the background. She comments on the texture it adds to their little world, and Jon gestures to Gerry with such beaming pride that he has to duck his head down and away from it. Away from dadi as she tells him that there’s no need to shy back from due praise.

The problem with lowering his head away from their eyes is that his own become fixed on the dreadstone image in the very bottom of his mind. The bottom of the sink that has no bottom anymore as he becomes heavier and heavier with knowing that _this_ will not last.

By supper’s end, dadi is finished lying.

She summons them into the living room and seats them side by side on the couch. Gerry watches her sink carefully down to the floor in front of them and wonders why she would bother if it hurts her knees. She positions herself between them and doesn’t tip to either side. Yet, Gerry’s mind tells him. She’s probably making sure that she can lean easily towards whichever one of them starts crying first. Gerry already knows it will be Jon. She should just crowd by his legs and wait there for when he bows forward. She should already know, too.

Because Jon hasn’t let go of Gerry’s arm since being asked to sit down. Not an elbow-round-elbow loop but a death grip with one hand, his fingertips pressing down hard. Jon’s not that strong, but Gerry has always bruised easy.

“I don’t think I need to remind you both of what’s going on here.” Dadi glances towards Jon. “Especially considering that you thought you could pull the wool over my eyes about it yourselves.”

Jon’s grip tightens and slips. “Dadima, I-I—”

“Please, let me finish.” Dadi folds her hands on her lap with a statue’s grace and patience. “I’m not angry with you. I know why you lied to me. I understand.”

Even now, she’s taking so long to get to the point. Gerry almost wants to snap at her to hurry up, to say it all at once. That wouldn’t help Jon, though. He leaves his jaw wired.

“I’m going to be as honest as I can be,” she says. “You both deserve to understand why I’m making this decision. I’m not saying this to hurt you. Either of you.”

Jon makes a terrible little sound low in his throat. Gerry imagines again the fingerprint bruises he might have by the time Jon lets go of his arm. For some reason, the thought is almost comforting. It’s keeping him from floating out of his head.

He’s present enough to meet dadi’s eyes when she seeks his. 

“Your situation is serious, but so is the one that I created by letting you stay here without your mother knowing. I could get into quite a lot of trouble for that.”

“For letting him stay?” Jon’s voice twists up high like a spire. “For _helping?”_

“Yes, Jon.” Dadi’s is just dolorous and low. “Because to his mother, I’m a complete stranger who kept her child from her for a weekend straight.”

Jon indignation is strangled. “Why should she have a say? She’s _bad.”_

“That may be so, but usually it’s left up to the law to decide that. These things are… they’re complicated, and they go beyond you and me. There have to be police involved, maybe social workers…”

Dadi glances at Gerry and he realizes very quickly that she’s a moment away from asking for confirmation. If anyone has ever called the police. He doesn’t know how to tell her that, more often than not, he forgets police are even real. They’re just as removed from his mum’s world as dadi is. Just as out of their depth. Just as unable to reach in and pull him from the dreadful bottomless sink. There is only drowning on the other side of his front door.

All he can give her is a shake of his head. Dadi sighs, rubs a hand over her eye. 

“I did call a social worker myself,” she says. “A friend.”

“And?” It takes a moment for Gerry to realize that the question had come out of his mouth and not someone else’s.

“And I asked her what else I could do to help you. She said that it’s very dangerous for all of us if I let you stay here any longer. That the police are the only people I can call, and I have to do it soon.”

Jon asks all the questions that Gerry is too hollow to feel a need for. “What happens then?”

Gerry doesn’t have to search hard for the pain in dadi’s face. “That’s up to Gera—”

_“Gerry,”_ Jon corrects. Gerry’s heart does something painful in his chest.

Dadi tries again. “That’s up to Gerry. Given the circumstances, they’ll likely conduct their own investigation no matter what.”

She searches his face next. “If you feel unsafe, Gerry, you should tell them about what’s going on. You need guidance I can’t give you. I don’t know enough about all this. The authorities will know far more than I do about what to do next, and they have more power than I do.”

Not enough power. Gerry already knows that whatever they can do, it won’t be enough.

Gerry knows his mum. What he doesn’t know is what police could possibly do against her. He doesn’t want to know what she could do to dadi for getting involved. What could dadi do to defend herself? What would happen to Jon if she ever learned who they were?

“This is _ridiculous,”_ Jon seethes, shattering Gerry’s thoughts. “We should just tell them everything, and then he can stay here.”

Dadi doesn’t roll her eyes, but rather her entire neck. Like fighting off a shudder, upset and uncomfortable at the notion.

“I wish it were that easy, Jon, believe me. And I would do that if it were possible.”

What Gerry’s heart does now is more painful than the first time. He stares hard into dadi’s face in search of the false truths, the mercy lie, and can’t find it. Why is it almost disappointing? What would be better about that being untrue? 

“Gerry,” she prompts. “Whatever you do, I have no choice but to make that call. I think doing so would give you options that driving you straight home wouldn’t give you.”

_“No.”_ The word leaves his mouth in a fireburst. “No, don’t— I don’t—” 

She wasn’t saying she would do it, she’s saying she won’t. Gerry tries again. Maybe defeat can just sound like understanding. They taste the very same in his mouth.

“They can just take me. The… police.”

Jon recoils almost violently, shaking his arm now and grabbing it with both hands. 

“Gerry!” His throat must hurt; every word he gets out squeaks like fork tines on a glass plate. “We have to do _something!_ You can’t just—”

“Jon, _please._ Try to calm down.” Dadi’s hand comes to rest on his knee, and he frees one of his own to nudge it away. Gerry watches her recoil, correct herself. She starts to address him, but the name comes out wrong and Jon snaps his second correction like he’s never feared being slapped for speaking out of turn.

“It’s _Gerry,_ dadima, and we _can’t_ just—”

Gerry turns himself towards Jon and tugs his arm out of his grasp. Jon is starting to shake and flinch as he tends to, as he has done on and off all weekend, as he must do when he’s overwhelmed, as he must still be since his induction into eyewitnessing, as he may never really stop being and doing. Gerry fits his arms around him to contain it for him, tie him up in something safer than webbing and waiting and _why._

Gerry already knows why. Maybe one day Jon will understand.

“Jon,” he says, “it’s okay.”

“No, it’s _not!”_ The sound of Jon crying is awful. Even when it’s quiet like this, even in only hiccups and gasps of restraint unrefined. “It’s not okay, it’s _not.”_

Gerry looks over the top of his head at dadi. It’s pointless for her to keep her face straight. Jon’s not even looking at her, and she hasn’t been able to hide her discomfort from Gerry since they first entered the same room. He’s seen her anger and her worry and her love. There’s no reason for her to pretend he can’t see the agony lines around her eyes.

It almost helps that he saw it coming. The dreadstone heavy feeling hasn’t moved from where it’s made its home in his stomach. It sends no brackish sink water up into his throat, it doesn’t press much behind his eyes. He leans his cheek on the top of Jon’s head and lets himself slump there instead. Last time.

Dadi waits a bit to speak again. Until Jon’s shaking is only in his hands as they flap and wring in the small space between his chest and Gerry’s stomach. Until she seems to find no purpose in waiting for Gerry to rediscover his own panic and do anything but stare. She doesn’t seem to like that he’s so calm any more than she likes the fact that Jon is not. There must be no pleasing her. Not really.

“I have to make that call tonight,” she repeats. “And when the police arrive, I need you to be quiet and let me do the talking.”

Jon lifts his head, smears his hand across his eyes. He had dropped his glasses onto his lap somewhere in the midst of ducking his head into Gerry’s shirt. “Why?”

Dadi shifts where she sits. Squares herself.

“Gerry, do you trust me?”

Does he? He believed her when she said she would help him. He thinks this is her trying to help him, even if it won’t work. He didn’t expect her to have even let him stay this long. He didn’t expect the meals, or the beach, or the place to sleep. Didn’t expect for her to wash his clothes for him and praise his art and call him brave. She didn’t owe him her trust, but she’d given it anyway. She didn’t have to lie and buy him time at her expense, but she did.

Jon isn’t looking at him, though, so he has to say it out loud if he wants it to be enough.

“I do. Yeah.”

Dadi looks at Jon as if to ask, _see?_ Jon rubs his eyes again, turns his attention up to Gerry. Gerry nods at him, squeezes his arm around his shoulder one more time. It seems to comfort him. He seems like he needs more comfort. Gerry doesn’t know how to ask for that, or if it’d even help. He hasn’t cried yet. It must help that he’d seen it coming. That’s it.

“Can we wait just a little longer?” Jon’s voice is damp and thinning. “Please?”

Gerry expects now to be when she finally stops giving them what they want, giving them space and time and lenience, but she nods her assent without pause.

“I’ll phone in an hour or so. I have to get some things ready.”

It almost seems silly to go back upstairs for just an hour when they’ll have to come back down here and endure whatever it is that happens when the police come to the door. They sulk off the couch and climb the stairs anyway, and the first thing that Jon does when he enters his room is kick a dinosaur figurine they had left on the floor and send it flying. He swallows his yelp of pain and it turns into a whine in his throat, half-bent forward in regret for his conniptions.

Gerry steadies him with a hand under his elbow before he has the chance to lose his balance. _That was stupid,_ he could say. _I’ll be fine._

He doesn’t say it. Won’t.

“It’s not fair,” Jon mumbles as he drags his sleeve under his nose. “What if we never see each other again?”

The question rides on the backs of so many others. _What will I do without someone who has seen what I have seen? Who will believe me now? When am I going to meet another monster? Will I be alone when I do? Will I remember any of this? Will you?_

Jon has a right to those questions. He’s been terrified since long before Thursday. If he felt so alone before, then how was he to anticipate feeling now? He won’t see Gerry in school tomorrow. He will dream of spiders and shadows and the static on his TV won’t help him any more than it did before. He knows things now, and can’t unknow them. He’s seen things now, and he’s still scared. 

It might feel overdramatic if Gerry didn’t know he was right about the likelihood of meeting again even better than Jon himself did. If the dreadstone in the well of his stomach didn’t know so well what it meant to be sunken, with no real way up. It might not feel so much like there’s no chance if they hadn’t met the way they had. If no one had to die to bring them into the same place. If they hadn’t filled a whole book with nightmares as much as they had filled another one with dreams.

It’s too late to fix it. The only going back that Gerry can do now is go back home. Maybe if he’s lucky, he won’t leave enough of himself behind that he becomes a haunting. If Jon is lucky, maybe he’ll forget as much as he’s been forgetting until he forgets this ever happened at all. Maybe Gerry can skip being a memory and just be a never instead. A never might not leave a mark.

It’s almost dadi he worries about most. Gerry doesn’t know the names of everything she fears, but they don’t seem to need teeth and blood to shake her. To scrawl agony in riddles around her eyes. To make her lie.

“I don’t know,” Gerry says. “It’s probably better we don’t.”

The hurt that comets across Jon’s face makes Gerry feel like he’s been slapped. Or like he should be. It makes him feel like he doesn’t deserve to still be standing so close to Jon, holding his arm to keep him steady, acting like he could ever be his friend. Gerry doesn’t know much about friendship, but it probably isn’t the right word for what he’s done.

What he’s done is shown up out of nowhere, filled Jon’s head with awful ideas, and set him up to be alone with them. There has been no avenue around the truth, but there will be a consequence for it. It’ll only be greater the longer they wait.

“Why would you _say_ that?” It comes out weaker than the demand that Jon probably intended for it to be. “Take that back.”

“I shouldn’t have even come here,” Gerry mutters. “Should have just made sure you got home and left.”

Jon shakes his head with anger. “You don’t even believe that, don’t _lie.”_

Gerry has never been good at lying. His mum never gives him the chance, and there’s hardly ever anyone else to lie to. Lying to Jon would do no good right now. He knows too much that he can’t unknow, even if he doesn’t know everything.

But how do you tell someone that they’re too important to be in your life?

He doesn’t believe it, though. Jon is right. Trying to convince himself that he does is a waste of time. It’s just so much _harder_ to admit that he’d felt safe here. Had fun here. That he doesn’t want to leave. Not wanting to leave is harder than knowing he has to.

Jon brushes him off before he has the chance to remember to let go. That’s fine. That helps. Gerry steps towards his rucksack on the floor and starts gathering up his things to stuff back inside it. It’s already packed with his clean clothes again, but he’d left his torch on Jon’s bed. He studies it for a long moment before he turns around to hold it out to him.

“You should keep this. So you can sleep better.”

Jon steps back and away. “No, _you_ need it to sleep. I have lamps, a-and my ceiling light, and—”

Gerry shrugs. “You can take this with you places.”

“I can buy my own anytime,” Jon hisses. “That’s _yours.”_

Defeat and understanding taste the same. Gerry zips it into his bag in silence while Jon crosses the room to his desk, his own messy collection of belongings. Gerry wishes he would stop making his footsteps so much heavier on purpose. Anger shouldn’t be the last thing that passes between them, but maybe he deserves that, too.

“We never gave it a title,” Jon says as he shoves their storybook into Gerry’s view. “We have to do that before you go.”

Gerry stares at the cover, the two figures sitting behind the frill of a triceratops in the middle of an open desert. There is room in the white paper sky for a title to be written, but looking at it now, he’s out of words. Something burns in his eyes, and it isn’t dreadstone heavy. He doesn’t have words for it. He’s out of words.

“I—” It won’t work. It won’t come out in anything but whispers. “I don’t know, Jon. I don’t know. You name it.”

_“No.”_ Jon is using too many voices at a time. This one is acidic, but it wavers. “I’m not doing everything myself. You have to _try.”_

“I _am.”_ His throat is a creaking floorboard. A hand rises up to clutch at his shirt, heel of his palm grinding down over his heart. It’s not beating right. “I _am_ trying.”

Jon drops the book down onto his blankets, his petulance thick and strangled. “No, you’re _not._ We have a whole hour left, a-and you’re acting like we don’t, you— we have _time_ to think of something, so think of it _with me._ Don’t just make me do it myself.”

“ _Stop_ it.” Gerry drops his face into his free hand, remembers the bruise on his cheek. “Don’t— don’t _yell_ at me, don’t.”

Gerry can’t tell if he wants to bury his face into the blanket in front of him or just sink onto the floor and curl up. It doesn’t seem to matter, though. The second his breath stutters in his mouth, Jon’s arms wrap tight around his ribs. It traps his own how they’re bent and folded, and the need to hide his face overtakes his will to unwind and participate in the embrace.

He shouldn’t cry over this. He’d seen it coming. He knew from the moment he got out of bed on Thursday morning. Mum must have known, too, and that’s why she hasn’t tried harder to find him. Why she hasn’t magically shown up by now and dragged him back by the hair. She’ll be waiting for him when he gets home, and that’s that.

“It’s like she’s in my _head.”_ He doesn’t mean to say it like a moaning dog, doesn’t mean to say it at all. Not to Jon, because Jon won’t understand, not really. It doesn’t stop the words from coming out, now that he has some. Any. “I don’t want to go back.”

“So tell that to the police,” Jon insists. “Tell them something, and don’t go home.”

“I _can’t,”_ Gerry cries. “You don’t understand what she’s like. Police won’t work, there’s nothing— it won’t work, I can’t.”

Jon’s desperate clutching trembles, but he doesn’t let go. Gerry feels him try and fail to rub a circle onto his back before he teeters and resorts back to gripping his shirt in fistfuls for balance. The sobs shaking through him must not make him very easy to hold onto. Jon should just let go. Gerry should stop hoping he won’t.

“Okay, so something else.” Jon sounds remarkably calm for a moment, even speaking through his own tears. “Run away again, but better this time. Pack more than three sandwiches, and warmer clothes. I have a big luggage bag from our last trip to Israel, I’ll—”

“Don’t,” Gerry interrupts. “It won’t work.”

“—I’ll come, too, and that way I don’t have to go to school _and_ you don’t have to go home. We could find—”

“Jon—”

“—with no monsters, a-and it won’t matter that we don’t have parents because—”

_“Jon!”_

Gerry doesn’t remember freeing his hands to seize Jon by the arms and push him away, so the full view of his face is almost shocking. Jon’s glasses are askew as they always are, fallen back down to rest crooked over his nose from where he had wedged them up onto his forehead to press his eyes hard onto the bony joint of Gerry’s shoulder.

He doesn’t sound so petulant anymore as he asks, “What?” It just matches, painfully, the betrayal on his face.

Gerry is swept into a wave of disconnect. His grip on Jon’s shoulders might be too hard but he can’t tell because his hands feel as numb as his legs do. His head and his chest are the only things that feel heavy enough to be real. Somebody speaks and it comes out of his mouth a lot steadier than he thinks it should through the way he’s still shaking like a beaten drum skin.

“You don’t seem to get that you’re safe here. You have a chance. You don’t get to talk like you actually believe you could give that up, or that I’d _ever_ let you. You’re better off.”

“But what about you?” If his grip on Jon’s shoulders is too hard, Jon doesn’t show it. He doesn’t wrestle away or fight. Just looks up at Gerry with those giant black eyes through his fogging glasses with his tremblechin questions and grief. “I don’t know if I’ll be fine, but I really feel like you _won’t_ be.”

Gerry shakes his head. “Don’t think about it.”

“Of course I’m gonna think about it, Gerry, you’re my friend.”

Heavychest starts to hurt again. “Don’t say that, either.”

“You’re my _friend,”_ Jon insists. He finally wiggles his arms out of Gerry’s grip, gives him a clumsy shove free himself. When Gerry relents, Jon just grabs his forearms. He does that funny little thing again, that awful invasive thing where he leans over under the space where Gerry’s head is hanging low and demands eye contact, demands to be seen.

“We’re _friends._ I don’t want to never see you again, what if— what if there’s another monster and it’s one you didn’t tell me about? And what if I beat it and get better at all this! What I get useful but then something comes after _you_ and I’m not there to help?” 

Gerry twists to hide his face more. He’s trapped between Jon’s insistence and the dresser behind him, his arms hanging loose in Jon’s grip. He hasn’t checked yet for those little finger-shaped bruises. He doesn’t want to open his eyes and look.

Jon isn’t finished arguing. “Who else is going to help you if I’m not there? You don’t ask for help, but you don’t have to ask for mine. What if I can just get better at helping?”

That isn’t it. That isn’t why. That’s not what it is. Jon doesn’t understand, still doesn’t get it, but maybe now it’s just because he doesn’t want to. He’s doing it on purpose now, refusing and fighting and trying when he shouldn’t and Gerry doesn’t know what to do against that.

The ridges of the drawers bump painfully against the notches of his spine when he leans back so hard against the dresser that he slides down to the floor. Jon lets him go down, only to follow. He crowds up against Gerry’s hip from one side and scrambles for a good grip on him, his thin arms like a cage around Gerry’s head. This feels backwards. Not right. Jon’s too small to hold all this together. All this everything that Gerry can’t hold together, either. It’s too big. It’s too much. 

It’s too much, but maybe he can let himself be held for a minute or two. Until Jon’s arms get too tired, or he stops crying so hard. Whichever comes first. If either of them come before the hour is up, before the _knock, knock_ that will ruin everything, everything, and take it all away.

Eventually it stops. Exhaustion crashes down like a sheet of rain and it becomes very hard to keep his head from rolling on Jon’s shoulder, his arms from dropping limp over his lap. For a little while there’s only the sound of sniffling, taking turns occupying the silence. Jon is rubbing uneven circles on his back. He must have been doing that for a while. Gerry can’t remember. Too tired to make sense of time.

When Jon sits back on his heels, Gerry has just enough strength to sit back up, too. As he wipes his face with both sides of both hands, Jon asks, “Do you feel better now?”

“What?”

Jon shrugs. “Crying’s supposed to help when you’re _overstimulated_ and _under duress._ I think if you don’t, you just get all stopped up and then one day you explode.”

“I don’t… think that actually happens.”

“Well, I’m not interested in finding out.” Jon crosses his arms, his legs shifting apart so that he’s sitting right between his feet. “I always feel better after, anyway. Being overstimulated is bad. Getting to be empty after all that is better.”

Gerry takes a minute to think about whether being empty is better than anything. Listening to Jon overenunciate complicated words is easier to focus on and almost find funny now, when he’s pretty sure he didn’t have it in him to find it funny before. What was the last big word he’d said like that, all chopped up and childish and out of place? Gerry can’t recall. He can’t tell if it’s good empty or bad empty. It’s just some sort of empty.

“It’s better, yeah,” he sniffs. “Little bit.”

“Good.” Jon pushes himself up on his knees enough to reach over the side of his bed for the storybook, then shuffles over to his side table to snag a marker before he sits down properly next to Gerry. “Let’s try naming this now. We have to before you go, it’s important.”

Gerry stares down at the cover again. The two figures on the back of the triceratops are shaded to reflect almost accurately the stark difference between his pale complexion and Jon’s clay brown, but they’d given Cavekid darker hair than his own. As if that would distract from the fact that it’s supposed to be him. Jon isn’t subtle at all. Gerry didn’t feel like fighting it. It didn’t even feel all that silly to him, embarrassing. Pitiful maybe, but not bad.

“I don’t know what to call it,” he admits again. “Anything I think of just sounds stupid.”

Jon starts flipping through the pages. “There are lots of ways to name a book. With the character’s names, or something important that happens, or a big major theme that stands for what the whole thing is about. Like the _Chrestomanci_ series! Chrestomanci is a made up word from the world everything’s in but the books are more direct. Like _The Lives of Christopher Chant,_ which sort of tells you what it’s about right away.”

“Does he actually have more than one life, or does he just pretend to be other people?”

“The first one,” Jon explains. “It tells about how he became the Chrestomanci after dying, but not really dying. Way before that he was always sort of different because he could travel between worlds in his dreams, so he gets tricked into doing a bunch of crimes because everybody has their own plans. They find out later he’s stronger than anybody else in the world as long as he’s not touching silver, and was only getting bad grades in magic lessons because his uncle gave him a silver coin he always had with him. The uncle’s the bad guy.” 

Jon sighs, dropping his head back against the dresser. After a second, he lets it fall onto Gerry’s shoulder. “Then they spirit him away to Chrestomanci Castle to _become_ the Chrestomanci, and he _hates_ it there. Doesn’t even want to be magic. Has no friends except a spirit guide, who helps him and goes everywhere with him until he gets imprisoned.”

Gerry’s brow furrows. “Him or the spirit?”

“The spirit,” Jon sighs. “The Chrestomanci frees him and he gets pardoned from the castle. Disappears after that.”

Jon closes the untitled storybook, sets it in his lap. Gerry stares down at the empty space again. He doesn’t think he’ll ever get around to reading the _Chrestomanci_ series himself, but it’s nice to just listen to Jon talk.

“Was it any good?”

Jon shrugs. “I wouldn’t read it again, but I remember it pretty well.”

Gerry lets his cheek come to rest at the top of Jon’s head. Jon remembers things he reads, but forgets things that happen. Gerry doesn’t know what to do with that information, or with the book review, or with how much he never wants to move from this spot ever again. But he’s calmer now. Emptier, not quite the empty he usually is. Not with Jon’s head trapped between his ear and his collarbone, the hard shoulder jamming up against his ribs. The small amount of weight makes a small amount of difference, but just enough of one.

He reaches to pull the book from Jon’s loose grip and flip through the pages himself.

“Well, there are no made up words in here we can use. We didn’t name him _Grulk.”_

The laugh that leaps out of Jon makes his entire body jolt, his hands flying up to cover his mouth. “W-We agreed not to say Grulk anymore! Don’t— don’t say _Grulk!”_

Gerry feels himself smile more than he tells himself to. “You just said it _twice.”_

“Because _you_ said it!” Jon’s giggles are as persistent as his earlier crying had been, his sharp elbow digging into Gerry’s side. “It’s too funny, it’s—”

Naturally, Gerry cuts him off by repeating the word. Three repeats in it’s obscured into something more like _grunk_ by his own building laughter, and after that he loses track of which one of them is coming up with worse and worse nonwords to not use for their title. Laughing so hard after crying so much is making his head feel almost like it did the last time mum had brought him to some open space in the middle of nowhere, where the air smelled like pool chemicals and it rose up like cold steam to call him down into the grass. Further down, maybe, or way, way up. Somewhere not standing, or sitting against Jon’s dresser laughing about something so completely stupid that he might regret wasting their last remaining minutes with it if the dizzy, floating feeling wasn’t a lot nicer now than it had been in that open space. Maybe this is good empty. Better empty.

When he can breathe well enough to form words with only a few breaks to gasp past what’s left of the laughter, he tries again to focus on the cover. “No— no made up words, and not their names. So, a theme. Dinosaurs are too— too easy, so I guess something more… uh…” 

“Conceptual?”

Gerry’s eyes squeeze shut as another laugh is indecisively caught between trying to leave him through his mouth or through his nose. Jon’s vocabulary makes him wonder if he’d defend himself to death if he were to ever pull the wrong giant word out of thin air.

“Sure, that I guess. Got anything?”

Jon shakes his head, a round of snickers returning. “I’m s-still thinking about Gr—”

Gerry stops him with a nudge. Jon crumples forward to laugh into both hands, his knees drawn up as if he can contain it by making himself smaller. Gerry tries to focus on the book once and for all, battling distraction with deep breaths. 

The most important thing he can think of in the story is the fact that the two characters shouldn’t even know each other. Cavekid shouldn’t exist anymore, had died thousands of years ago and should have stayed bones deep under the desert. It was pure fate that brought Jon’s character to that precise spot in the sand, told him to dig and not to stop. It’s all magic that lets them even speak the same language; no explanation, no anything, just Jon wanting them to be friends despite not occupying the same world until right then and there. Not being from the same time.

Gerry’s mouth twists to the side in thought. He reaches around on the floor for the marker that Jon had dropped in front of them at some point, bends his knees up to rest the book against while he traces a title into the open space in the cover’s sky. Jon tips over to the other side when Gerry moves too much to lean on, sniffing and rubbing his eyes of the last of his laughter to read it when Gerry places it back on his lap.

_“Time and Place,”_ he repeats. “That’s really smart, wow. I like it!”

Gerry scoffs, handing him the marker. “Hope so, ‘cuz there’s no erasing it now.”

“It’s more important that you like it,” Jon says. He nudges the book back onto Gerry’s lap. “You’re the one who gets to keep it.”

The pleasant fog in Gerry’s head is cut with cold, like a speck of hail. “Jon, I can’t take this.”

“Why not? You have to take _something_ with you to remember me.”

“No, I can’t, it—” A tight sigh. “I don’t want it to get ruined.”

Jon wilts. “Would your mother do something to it?”

“I don’t know,” Gerry says. “Maybe. I don’t want to risk it, I don’t… want her to ever know who you are. Or dadi. Or where your house is, or what town this is, or that I was okay here.”

“Won’t the police tell her anyway?”

Icy hail comes down harder. “I hope not.”

“They might, so you should just take this with you anyway.”

“No, Jon.” It’s too personal, it’s too simple, too… maybe not completely innocent given what they’d seen together, but too unlike every other book in their flat. Too opposite to everything that should ever pass through his front door. It’s just paper and marker and crayon and stubborn happiness and Gerry can’t bring himself to let that change somehow. To just drop it into the dreadsink and watch it darken and dissolve into pulpy bits that could never be put back together.

Bringing it home with him would do just that, so he won’t. Jon can fight him on it all he wants. He won’t do it.

Jon pulls himself up by the side of his bed and drops _Time and Place_ onto the blankets, crossing the room then to grab up his notebook instead. He slips the marker into the rings, flipping open to a page in the middle and scrutinizing it with worry. “Did we put everything in here? Is there anything we forgot?”

“Let me check.” Gerry reaches out a hand. “Give it.”

He might as well go through and be sure there’s nothing missing. Even Jon knows better than to offer this for him to take anyway; it was always meant for Jon to keep in Gerry’s absence. The least Gerry can do is make sure it’ll actually have everything he might need in it.

For someone who made fun of his handwriting before, Jon’s isn’t all that much easier to read. Looking at the book right-side-up now, Gerry still has to turn it sometimes to actually read the notes he squeezed in next to speculative doodles of monsters he’d made up while Gerry told him about them. Not all of them are quite right, but the sight of them makes him turn pages slower. It’s weird. They’re just memorable enough that hatred rises up in Gerry’s throat, hatred for what they are and for having put the images in Jon’s head, too, but they’re just cartoonish enough to feel like it could all just be made up after all. If anyone else ever looked at this, they might just see a wild imagination.

“You’re never gonna tell dadi about this, are you?”

Jon snorts. He’s come to sit on the edge of his bed, feet dangling over the dark space underneath. “Of course not. And you don’t get to tell me I should, since you’re not telling the police the truth, either.”

Fair, probably. Gerry still narrows his eyes at him for a moment before giving up. He flips the page and comes face to face with a big, open mouth like a black hole lined with rows of shark teeth.

“Yeah,” he agrees. “It won’t help if I do. But promise you’ll still tell her the other stuff.”

“Other stuff?”

“School,” Gerry reminds him. “She already knows about it. Get it over with.”

Jon shuffles. “I still don’t think there’s anything to tell her.”

“There is.”

Gerry reaches the final full page of the notebook. There are still some empty ones at the back. Some part of him itches to try and fill them now, reach into his own head and fish around for anything left in there that might be just what Jon needs to survive, so small and eager and angry and afraid and so full of fight where Gerry wishes he’d just agree that flight is safer. Does dadi know he’s like this? Does she know how brave he is? How bad that might be someday?

It’s not something to kill. Gerry doesn’t know what to do, though. Telling him to embrace fear and let it rule him is just as bad as telling him he can take on the world if he believes hard enough, packs enough batteries for his torch and protects his neck in the dark. There’s no way to win, not really. 

There’s really only one thing he can hope for.

Gerry turns to the last page in the notebook and uncaps the marker. By the time he’s finished carefully inscribing what he’d left out, Jon lets out a stuttering sigh. Gerry looks up to see him curling his arms tight around his stomach, frowning anxiously at the side table.

“What is it?”

“It was 6:15 when we came up here,” Jon tells him. “It’s 7:00.”

Gerry looks down at the page in his lap and rereads the words there, once, twice, three times, before closing it for good. He hooks the marker back in the rings and holds it in his lap for a while, glances around the room for anything left that they need to do.

He’s packed. He’s not taking any books with him, or leaving his torch behind. Everything will be as it was, with the sole exception of the peanut butter sandwiches he’d left London with. The only thing that he’ll prove to his mother is that he couldn’t fight hunger any more than he could fight to leave her. He doesn’t know how long it’ll take her to get angry, or if she ever bothered to be. He has a feeling she’ll probably just laugh at him. For trying, for failing. For proving her right.

Jon’s shoulders curl as he ducks his head forward and sniffs hard enough for Gerry to remember he’s still here, still in this room, still with a friend whether it’s fair to call him that or not. He sets the notebook on the side table by the clock and moves _Time and Place_ aside so that he can sit beside Jon and sigh. The dark space under Jon’s bed isn’t scary enough to either of them now, it seems, to do anything but let their legs dangle in front of it. If something were going to pop out and grab them, it’d have done it by now. If something is going to try someday, it’ll do it whether they curl up on the mattress and hide or not. There’s no control to be had. Nothing that operating under terror will do to change this goodbye into a future.

“I don’t want this,” Jon says. “I don’t want to know these things all by myself.”

“I’m sorry.” Just a whisper. Nothing all that smart follows after.

Jon rubs his face again. His sleeves are smeared with big wet spots from before, big enough that they still haven’t faded. “I just wish it’d help _you.”_

“I’ll be fine,” Gerry finally tries, for lack of anything better. “And you’ll be fine.”

“I’ll miss you, though.” 

And it’s so painfully ordinary that Gerry almost forgets how to remember much of anything at all. Something interferes with the next breath he means to take, ties the air in his mouth into a knot he can’t swallow without trying twice. It isn’t dreadstone that rises up in his throat and it isn’t openfield floating pressing down from the sky. 

Jon’s fingers wrap again around his wrist and he looks down to see if he’s lined them up with where he imagined those fingerprint bruises, only to watch as Jon transfers his grip to Gerry’s hand instead. Gerry’s arms feel too numb at first to make it easy for Jon to slot their fingers together, but Jon doesn’t give up until their palms meet. When Jon digs his fingertips into the spaces between Gerry’s knuckles, there is no easier reflex than closing his hand, too, and squeezing back.

It’s the best he has in terms of saying it back. Jon seems to understand, and responds in kind by curling himself around Gerry’s whole arm, his chin hooking over his shoulder. Gerry sags under his weight, leans into it. Closes his eyes. There’s not much else to say, after that.

Not much until the _knock, knock_ finally comes. Even after, there’s nothing Gerry can say to comfort Jon when he jolts upright so hard that his head bumps Gerry’s jaw hard enough to smart. Not much to say that would unlatch Jon’s hands from his arm. 

Not much to say to dadi when she slips halfway through the door with a grim face and a limply waving hand. She doesn’t seem to have much to say, either. She doesn’t say _they’re here,_ or _come with me,_ or _it’s time._ Just looks at them and waits for them to stand up and follow. Waits for the whimper of protest in Jon’s throat to give way to compliance, for Gerry’s legs to work well enough for him to take the first step.

Gerry takes the first step. Jon’s recent calm was superficial, a butterfly net around a bleeding animal too big to be contained or put down quietly. Gerry can feel a cloudy warmth gathering in the pocket of air left between their palms, and for that reason just holds on tighter.

He doesn’t reclaim his hand as he bends down to pick up his rucksack from the floor, or when it’s time to put on his shoes. One is enough to fix the left, but he’d need both for the stubborn heel tab on the right and he’d rather just walk on it folded than ask that Jon let go.

There are two uniformed men in the living room when they get down the stairs. Gerry doesn’t have much of anything to say to them, either. Dadi must have said everything she felt like she needed to say to them before she came upstairs herself. Gerry can’t quite get a look at their faces. The only thing that feels even a little bit real is the soft bite of Jon’s fingernails poking through the numbness at the back of his left hand, and the paper bag that dadi presses into his right.

“I fixed you up something to take with you.” Her voice is just familiar enough to pierce the unclear. “It’s a long drive back to London.”

Gerry doesn’t know if it will feel longer or shorter than it had on the way to Bournemouth the first time. How different is it by car than by train? How different alone in the backseat with strange men up in the front, probably asking questions until they realize they won’t get anything out of him that’ll help? Help. As if they could help anything. As if this is worth anything. As if he’s not dead already.

Dadi’s face comes into view in front of him and blurs. Hands that aren’t Jon’s settle tentatively on his upper arms, and he doesn’t bother to freeze away from them. A thumb brushes under the bruise on his cheek and the palm underneath it isn’t clammy like Jon’s is when he leans his chin into it. He doesn’t know why he bothers, or why he would bother not doing it. His head is empty enough to move on its own.

The hand doesn’t stay there long. A moment later, a piece of paper is being held up between his face and the almost-real one in front of him, folded into a neat rectangle.

“You call this number if you need anything.” The voice is pillar calm and promising. “ _Anything,_ Gerry. Do you hear me?”

Does he hear? Is that who he is? Are these words really being said to him, or is he just wishing they were? His hands are too full to take the offered thing. His hands don’t move, so the hands around him do. The paper bag is taken from him and he hears the paper unrolling, the shuffle of something being tucked inside, the soft noise of it being set on the ground. He hears that, so he must have heard the words, too. He can still hear, even if the face in front of him just makes him think of the jar of water that houses his used paintbrushes. He does miss painting. Maybe this won’t hurt so bad after all, if he can paint again.

“It’s in the bag now, so you won’t lose it. Will you look at me?”

_I am looking at you,_ he thinks, but maybe he isn’t. It would be easier to know for sure if he could trust his eyes.

There comes a tug from his left side, the weight in and around his hand like an anchor hitting the sand. He blinks, and dadi has a face again. She has a frowning mouth and eyes as dark as Jon’s but for the pain lines around them. She is looking at him in a way that tells him that if any of those pain lines are new, he is the one who put them there. She is looking at him in a way that says even if that’s true, she doesn’t care, and that he should call her anyway. She is looking at him and he thinks she sees him.

“Thank you,” he says quietly, and then the way she looks at him stops being something he understands. When she draws him forward into her arms, he doesn’t know what to do but stand there.

Her grip is as tense as his shoulders, but her blouse smells like flowers and tea smoke. For a long moment, all he can do is breathe in and think about it, his eyes wide open with dry burning as he stares at a button not too far from his nose. He doesn’t know much about dadi and never will, but he knows she is not much more relaxed than he is. This is something to memorize. He may never feel so safe with an old woman again, and so maybe she should know that.

Slowly, his free arm comes up around her waist. He only twitches a little bit when her hand touches the back of his hair. Maybe this is as close as “safe” gets.

Being let go of is what tips him over the edge of not knowing what his body feels like anymore. It must be fine working on its own, because the paper bag ends up in his unheld hand again and he doesn’t drop it to the floor.

The warping, imagined silence breaks with the shrill sound of Jon’s final attempt at argument, at _no, don’t send him back, can you just listen?_ He doesn’t want to listen. It’s hard to listen. The anchor tug to his hand stops him from drifting towards the policemen when they beckon him over, when his legs start to move despite the very small and muffled voice inside his head screaming that he can’t leave, that they can’t just _do this,_ that he can’t just let them.

When Jon steps between him and the door, Gerry remembers being Gerry long enough to let go of his hand. His fingers are stiff and sore and Jon whips around to face him with a look that some autonomous sprocket in his mind rustily classifies as enormously betrayed. Jon is shaking his head and repeating words that feel like _no, no, don’t_ somewhere in Gerry’s chest even if his ears are ringing too loudly with bloodbeat and _not ready_ to really hear them.

He has both arms now to hug Jon back when that’s all there is left to do. He can be Gerry for that and lean his cheek on Jon’s head again, bruise to blackbird feather, to memorize this, too. It occurs to him somewhere in the haze that there is no glass or metal between Jon’s face and his chest. Jon had left his glasses upstairs, had braved the trip down here without being able to see right. Why? Just for this? 

Gerry is in the process of committing that to memory when dadi reaches for Jon’s shoulders and pulls them apart. He can’t tell if the policemen have been saying words this whole time or not, if anyone’s been expecting him to have words, if he’s said any that matter. 

The clearest thing in front of him is Jon’s face as he’s drawn backwards, the glisterblack wet eyes. He thinks he almost sees the moment that all the fight finally drains out of him and gives way into helplessness. When he stands slack under dadi’s hands and lets his arms hang down by his sides like a sleepy marionette, resigned.

A policeman guides him to the door by the shoulder, and he goes. The night air doesn’t wake him up enough to let him register the view of the street from the vantage point of the porch, or from the pavement when he reaches it. By the time the car door closes behind him, it doesn’t matter anymore. The view has passed him by, and he’s left with the sorry sight of Jon through the window, half in the doorway with dadi looming behind him. Her hands cross over his chest and his latch onto her wrists. Little bug in a web and kept from running. 

No. No, not trapped. Not like that. It’s the other way around.

The drive feels like being dragged by the ankle across jagged ground by a long tether, unbroken by distance and too strong to sever by hand. Not spider silk but worse, wettened unwhite with bad blood and family and the still-living torment of missing her. Of thinking, now that he is alone again, that maybe she might look at him differently after he’s been gone. After she’d lost him for just a little while, after he’s told her so unavoidably that he’s in pain. That maybe she’ll be sorry for once, and the only hands she’ll put on him from now on will be a little more like the ones that he had just leaned into willingly, and not the ones that made him feel like he just couldn’t live in his body anymore as he had to live with her.

The paper bag comes open and he ignores the aloo parathas and the fruit snacks and the juice box and the apple in favour of the neat rectangular of folded paper floating around among it all. The note comes open in his hands and the numbers become something in his mind. Something he can still see when he rips it into little pieces, reduces it to the only thing it could ever be to keep the place it traces back to safe. To keep blood out of the water, and ward off the sharks.

The front pocket of his rucksack comes open and the policemen don’t notice the lighter until his third try at coaxing a flame out of it, until the collection of bits burns halfway and he realizes he doesn’t have anywhere to drop it. They notice when he hisses as he snuffs it out between his sleeves, as he’s blowing out what’s left before it can spread. The lighter is taken from him. It’s fine. The note is an unreadable scrap, the number entirely gone. It never existed.

He can still see the numbers when he wants them. They walk across the backs of his eyelids like marching ants, formation unchanged even as one hour turns to two, even as the policemen ask their questions, even as they give up on him. He taps them out against the side of his leg like a percussive code, and he hopes that she never learns how to understand it. He’ll beg for solitude in his head for when his mind recites the digits like a prayer, a signal for some faraway boat to remind it that he’s sinking. 

He stops counting them when the thrum of motion ceases around him. When car doors swing open, when night air hits him again, when there is a porch underneath his feet, when the _knock, knock_ ruins everything. He can’t count them when the doorway opens up like a black hole of a mouth and the first thing he sees in the shadow of it is hers, sharp and simpering with sharksmile. He can’t risk her hearing it when he remembers them. When she speaks her greeting, empty becomes full again with awareness of his place.

_“There’s_ my Gerard.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **CWs: heavy dissociation; lots of reference to mary (no onscreen abuse is ever shown in my work, but gerry DOES think about it and the impact is there)**
> 
> i will remind you now that this is a **FIX-IT**! i am PROMISING you RIGHT NOW that all this chaos will have a payoff. i am not putting them through nonsense like this for nothing.
> 
> also: the chrestomanci series is by diana wynne jones, the author that jon references in his statement in MAG 81! haha isn't it so fun that she literally has a book that more or less details what happens to him, too! isn't that just fucking nutty!
> 
> catch me on tumblr @[gerrydelano](http://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/)!


	7. trim your sails

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The sun is lower on the horizon by the time they leave, but still casts enough light to colour the outline of every building with a bright glow that almost hurts Jon’s eyes to focus on for too long as they walk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> all i have to say is: _trust_ me.

_trim your sails - make changes to suit new circumstance_

───── ☆ ─────

“How do I look?”

Jon runs a hand down from her collar, flattens the gold-patterned tie against her breastbone. He almost doesn’t want to indulge her cheeky smile with one of his own; he knows damn well that Georgie can tie her own ties, and hadn’t needed his help.

He’d given it to her anyway, of course, because that’s the sort of thing you do for your girlfriend when she’s trying to look nice for an evening out. She’d paid him the same attentions when she plucked a piece of lint off the saree draped over his shoulder. He was too lightheaded to notice it himself among the swirling, golden-pink embellishments, but it was clear as day to her when he stepped sheepishly out of the hotel bathroom and finally let her see what he’d been hiding from her so expertly until this occasion.

It’s the first time he’s ever dared to wear something like this. This is— this is overt, this is loud and _look at me_ in a way he doesn’t quite know how to navigate, because it’s not like being onstage in a costume. That, he can do, because it isn’t him.

Jon doesn’t know if it’s the most honest he’s been with himself yet, but it’s probably the most honest he’s been with his friends. This might be him, for all he knows, and he won’t know for certain until they walk out onto the sunlight outside.

Not that he’s never worn Indian clothing in public before. Every once in a while he wanders around on campus to peer into the auditorium when the India Society puts on events, dressed to blend in. He’s gone to see their movie screenings and lecture panels, but he has yet to let anyone convince him to go to the Emporium for a Bollywood Bop. The OxHoli celebration at Rose Hill had been worth buying a new white shirt to stain with love and colours from people who smile at him when they pass between classes even three months later. 

But wearing a saree is different than a shalwar kameez, or immersing boundlessly into a crowd of coloured water and powder. Jon has felt safe before in kurtas that couldn’t catch on anything and unravel, with churidar underneath that bunched at his ankles. Those suits are just as much menswear as they are women’s. He’s flown under the radar in earthy tones and plain cotton, and been fine.

It’s just that he’s always liked the beaded ones more. The bright ones, like bird feathers and precious jewels. The ones his bebe wears in some of the pictures he still has of her, half-recognizable and too beautiful to be where he’d really come from. He wishes he had her cheekbones, or her chin, a shape even just _something_ like hers. Anything of hers that he didn’t have to go to the supermarket to restock on when he runs out.

The best he’s been able to do is grow his hair. It’s not long enough yet to form an impressive braid, but it holds a deliberate curl better than he thought it might. He’s never tried that, either, until a friend taught him how. He’s never worn a choli blouse, never felt comfortable baring his midriff even if he planned to cover it up with complicated swathes of fabric.

Now, he’s relying on a crepe petticoat to keep his first attempt at draping a saree held together. It feels — stronger than he thought it would, even _knowing_ that women have worn these securely for centuries and made true art out of it. It never felt like he could wrap himself up that securely, and that the problem lay with him. Him and his narrow hips and his flat sides and his skinny chest and his too-sharp shoulders, even with how little muscle he has to his name. Even if he managed to get it to stay, it would still outline the wrong silhouette.

Alma had tried to amend it by lending him a bra. They’re about the same size around the ribs — about the same in a lot of ways, she tells him sometimes, even if she’ll always be that much prettier. He considered trying to pretend to be, just for one night, but he’d chickened out the minute they were within ten metres of the Victoria’s Secret to buy something to properly stuff it with and resigned to go without. Alma didn’t push him, only told him that Georgie was going to swoon all over the place when she saw him either way.

Jon had told her to stop exaggerating, but he’d known to expect _something_ when she finally got a look at him. What he hadn’t expected was the way it would make him feel.

Georgie had let out an astonished, exultant sigh that actually made him shiver with some terrible combination of mortification and love. Her round face lit up into a smile so wide he could see her dimples across the room. Her attempt to meet him in the open floor space at the foot of their bed was interrupted by her tripping on the corner of the blanket hanging off the edge, but she didn’t take her eyes off of Jon long enough to even laugh too hard at herself for it.

He’s never been good at identifying his emotions, but the ones that rose up in him at her clumsy, open adoration were ones he doesn’t think he’s ever had the chance to study. He thought maybe he wanted to run. He knew he wanted to kiss her. He wondered if this was what they mean by _gender euphoria,_ or if he was just being too much. 

Georgie kissed him first. She let him know with no shortage of bright words that she was proud of every petal and leaf sequinned into the pallu that she couldn’t help running her hands over when he reached out to fix her tie. Georgie tends to see him more clearly than he sees himself.

It goes both ways, sometimes. Jon adjusts the lapels of her suit jacket with a firm tug before smoothing them down, as unbothered as she is by where his hands sit over her chest. She’d broken out her binder for this occasion. She’s not just fishing for a compliment when she asks how she looks. She’s asking for the same reasons that he can’t ask for himself.

Even knowing that, Jon is still inclined to play difficult as long as he can.

“Handsome as ever,” he tells her, as if he can remotely pretend it’s not a fact that so frequently sends his heart into embarrassing fits. The answer leaves his mouth in a sigh, punctuated by the rolling of his eyes. The smile finds its way onto his mouth anyway, too eager to share a synchronous moment with the way hers has grown that much wider.

“Coming from you right now, I’ll want that on my tombstone.” Her eyes are brimming with nine times the life than he sees in them sometimes, when she’s in her quiet moods. “You’re so beautiful.”

A laugh bubbles out of Jon’s mouth, nervous and reeling. He plays compulsively with the gold trim of his choli sleeve where it hugs his forearm, marveling still at the contrast of dark navy against the vibrant pink draping. He knows the _outfit_ is beautiful, but he hadn’t quite been able to make out his face in the mirror. Make himself out as the person wearing it.

“It’s sort of— heavy? N-Not just because it’s six yards of fabric, but… Georgie, you’re _really_ sure it’s not too obvious I shouldn’t be wearing this?”

Now Georgie’s brow twitches down, her fingers going to the bangles around his thin wrist. “What’s obvious is how much you need to be wearing it. Just let yourself be, Jon. We’ll be sitting in the dark for most of the night anyway.”

“Except for the parts where we’ll be walking to and fro between methods of public transport. In Dublin, Ireland.” He shuffles, rubbing at his fingernails. “People are going to stare.”

“If they do, it’s just because they’ve never seen anybody so pretty before.” Georgie laughs. “That, or they’re just really white.”

Jon scoffs, a little bitter. “I just can’t help but wonder how the India Society would view me wearing this, either.” 

Not that he knows for sure. They’re all incredibly kind. Gender roles are rigid, yes, but presentation can vary, depending. He’s studied, he’s thought about it, mapped out as many loopholes as he could, but he’s— he’ll stick to a shalwar kameez, to be safe. That’s expression enough, for the setting.

Georgie nods, understanding. “Then it’s better to give it a shot while you’re just with us, and a bunch of total strangers you’ll never see again.” She squeezes his hand. “No judgment. Let’s all just have a good time, alright? We’re all right here with you.”

Georgie sets her hands at his waist to balance herself as she cranes her neck up for a kiss, teasing now about his new height in his modest heels in quite the opposite of complaint. Jon hardly has the time to move her braids out of the way so he can properly wind his arms around her shoulders before they’re interrupted by a voice from the doorway.

“Are you lovebirds about done? We’ll be late if we don’t head out now!”

Leo is in a suit, too, her sandy hair slicked back with gel and her jacket finally buttoned at what Jon assumes is the behest of Alma behind her. Alma herself is in a long, black gown, clinging firmly to the curve of her hips only to gather in sweeping waves around her knees, skimming the carpet around her heeled sandals like the elegant frills of a jellyfish. 

Jon swallows a surge of envy at the sight of her, focusing quietly on the feeling of Georgie thumbing the place where his saree is pleated at his waist. She’d said he looks beautiful, too. Remember that. Remember _that._

Alma tells him as much herself when they all cluster at the door on their way out. “Look at _you,_ gorgeous!” She grins, plucking harmlessly at the edge of the pallu fabric falling around his hip. “And your makeup! Let me see, turn your face.”

Jon turns his head as directed, eyes on the ceiling in an attempt not to cringe away in his nerves. “I think I might have overdone it with the wings. One side was thicker than the other, so I had to even it out, and then _that_ side was—”

Alma shakes her head, caressing his cheek before she pats it gently. “No, they’re _perfect.”_ Then she sighs, and clicks her tongue. “And so the student surpasses the teacher.”

“Femme wars,” Leo snorts, stepping out into the hall to hold the door open.

Alma turns to her with a pointed finger. “Absolutely not, don’t you ever say that again. We’re supposed to _love_ each other.”

Jon lets Alma hook her free elbow around his, a little honored by the decision to stick close to his side in favour of Leo’s. 

No one seems to mind. It’s like he’s just as important.

Words and implications dash around in his stomach like a storm of sandpipers. He itches to clutch his saree tighter around himself, but he doesn’t want to pull it undone. 

Alma’s other arm is full with her flute case, the strap of her purse crossed over her chest so that the bag bumps back and forth between their hips as they walk in step between Leo and Georgie on either side of them.

The sun hasn’t fully set yet, the streets of Dublin still golden with daylight as they make their way towards town away from the hotel that their university’s symphony had booked for Alma’s concert. She’s the one with a school sanctioned rooming arrangement, but it hadn’t been hard to manage tagalongs. Jon and Georgie had been pooling money together little by little to cover this trip and support her — Jon trying extra hard to save up for this saree, too — and to get the hell out of Oxford for a few days. So far it’s been worth it, and tonight is the big night.

“We’ll make it to the station in time even if we sit down, right?” Georgie asks. “I don’t want to have to eat on the rail.”

Jon twists his arm up a bit without dislodging Alma’s grip on him to check his watch. “We should be fine as long as we’re quick about it. Alma, you’re really alright to eat beforehand?”

She elbows him with a laugh. “My stage fright is a right beast, but that doesn’t mean I can’t feed _myself._ I’m not interested in fainting right out of my chair in the middle of _Romeo & Juliet_.”

“You better not do that,” Leo quips. “Only got one person aside that could catch you, considering you’re _first chair_ and all.”

Now Alma reaches out with her flute case to bat her butch on the bicep, her pretty mouth twisted up into mostly-false modesty. “Hush, you! There’s still a violinist on my right, and he’s far too scrawny to be a reliable cushion. I just want _bangers and mash,_ dammit. The real deal.”

“I love when you say _bangers,”_ Leo sighs, wistful. “Musical, honestly. Say it again.”

Jon glances to Georgie when he feels her bump up against his arm, another set of private smiles passed between them. Sometimes it’s nice just to listen to someone else take their turn on the loving bickering.

His own small bag is easily transferred into the hand curled up in front of his chest, and he reaches for Georgie’s with the other. She meets him palm to palm as quickly as she always does, even lifts his hand up to press a quick kiss to the back of it. It’s not fair, really, how seamless her affection is.  Even when she trips all over herself in her excitement like before, it never feels — insincere. It’s as effortless as how well she cleans up, how she holds doors open like chivalry is a birthright that she can’t fathom failing to embody at every given opportunity. 

It makes her feel good, and so Jon doesn’t try to reach for the handle before she does, or walk on the street side of the pavement when they head out into town. He and Alma both fight to pay their share of dinner checks when the squabble typically begins, but that’s just being budget-conscious.

Leo insists that she cover the entire bill this time around, and doesn’t take no for an answer. Something about treating her girl on her big night, and taking care of friends, too. They toast to beautiful music and bangers and mash, and Alma almost laughs Cidona onto her dress before she and Leo both rush to cup a hand under her chin at the same time.

“What exactly was the plan there, Lee?” Georgie fights to ask through body-wracking chuckles.

Jon, in much the same state, follows up seamlessly with, “What on _earth_ was that meant to accomplish?”

“I’ve heard about enough out of you two.” Leo points at them firmly across the table, but her arm shakes as much as the smile she speaks through. “As if you wouldn’t take a handful of _anything_ to protect that getup, Barker.”

“I wouldn’t say _anything,”_ Georgie snorts. She slings her arm around Jon’s shoulders, invites him to lean into her side as he _guffaws._ “…Okay, probably anything, yeah.”

The sun is lower on the horizon by the time they leave, but still casts enough light to colour the outline of every building with a bright glow that almost hurts Jon’s eyes to focus on for too long as they walk. Alma has returned to Leo’s side, her hand fitted under her suit jacket to cling onto her belt. Jon doesn’t tend to cling to Georgie in the same way, usually. It’s just nice to walk side by side.

Probably better for it, too, because when Georgie goes sailing towards the ground, Jon just barely manages to avoid being dragged down with her.

It’s all a blur of bumping into one another like a trail of dominos, Georgie’s shoulder knocking so hard into Jon’s arm on her way down that he’s sent careening into Alma by the sheer force of it. Alma manages to keep a hand tight around the handle of her flute case even as she grips at the back of Jon’s saree with a tight fist to support him, and Leo is solid enough behind her to keep them both from tumbling the rest of the way.

Georgie is not near so lucky. In his shock and panic, Jon is almost torn on where to focus; his girlfriend as she curses up a storm from the pavement, or the rapidly fleeing reason for her fall. The street is moderately crowded, and it might have been easy to lose sight of the offender were they not the only person running full pelt into the heart of the city, a streak of black hair whipping behind them in the self-made wind of their speed.

Leo’s shout is what shakes him from his stupor long enough to commit to the fact that Georgie is far more important. He and Alma scurry up to her side to each take one of her arms and haul her up, dust her off, check her for scrapes and bleeding. The duty quickly becomes his alone when Alma whirls around to seize Leo by the arm and give a harsh pull, to keep her from taking off after the runner herself and following through with the very colourful threats pouring out of her mouth.

“Don’t!” Alma snaps. “We still have to catch the light rail. It’s not _worth_ it, Lee, let it go!”

Leo snarls towards the city. The runner has disappeared entirely from view, lost in the crosshatch of foot traffic and teetering vehicles. Jon clutches onto Georgie’s sleeve as he squints into the answerless crowd with disdain, only sparing it one more moment before he turns his attention back to Georgie entirely.

Her frown is so _sad_ when she laments the state of her left sleeve, the slight pull in the fabric by her elbow where it had caught on cement on her way down. Jon takes it upon himself to resituate her tie behind her suit jacket, swatting at her arms even when all the bits of street debris are gone. She lets him fret, pressing a hand uncomfortably to her chest and squirming as if that alone can fix a twisted binder.

“I’m a brick g-ddamn _wall,”_ she complains. _“How_ did that skinny sod take me down so easy?”

Jon didn’t see whether the person was skinny or otherwise, and doesn’t really care. He shrugs, bitter and unwilling to sympathize with whatever had them running like that. “Must have somewhere very important to be.”

“Better be worth this suit,” she mutters. “I’m never going to get this muck out all the way.”

Jon cranes forward to peer at the muck in question, a patchy smear of grime streaking up the side of her forearm. Quickly, he unlatches his bag to fish around for a Tide stick and uncap it, reaching for her wrist to angle her arm out towards him. She only has the chance to laugh once before Alma is tugging at his elbow, too.

“The rail!” she reminds them. “Clean up on the _rail!”_

“Alright, alright!” Jon sighs. He gives Georgie an apologetic look. “You’re okay, though?”

“Oh, I’m fine,” Georgie says. “Just _amazed,_ frankly. Think Leo’s more mad than I am.”

Leo’s still muttering about thoughtless, sketchy bastards not looking where they’re going, not apologizing when they knock into people while they’re in their own little world. Alma herds her towards the rail station, adjoining together words of validation, praise, and pleading for her to relax. By the time they get to the platform, Leo just looks sullen. She steps up to Georgie and gives her a once over, too, and claps her on the shoulder in approval for taking the fall like a champ.

“Still wish I could have gotten my hands on him,” Leo sneers as they find a section of empty seats near the far end of the cart. “Cannot _believe.”_

“No harm, no foul,” Georgie shrugs, pulling Jon along to sit down beside her. “I think at this point I just want to know why he was in such a hurry.”

Jon mutters something rather unkind as he crosses his arms and faces the window. The bright orange glow of sunset is long gone now, the dark cloak of nighttime deepening as the train starts to move forward.

“If I’m letting it go, _you_ all need to let it go.” Georgie points at all of them sternly, lingering on Jon’s sour disposition. “You. Quit pouting.”

“I’m not _pouting,”_ he says. “I’m just—”

“Pouting.”

“ _Offended_ on your behalf.”

“Well, get over it.” She sticks out her sleeve in front of him, wiggling her arm to catch his attention. “Get that silly magic detergent wand back out and help me look nice for Alma’s concert. This is about her, not my cinematic faceplant. I can’t look this crappy escorting her in, and I _definitely_ can’t look this crappy with you on my arm.”

Leo and Alma spare a laugh at the expense of his Tide stick more than Georgie’s tumble, but Jon obliges without further argument aside the heat risen in his cheeks. The quicker he tends to the stain on her suit jacket, the sooner it’ll disappear, and their night can continue on as planned.

It’s very easy to forget life’s little annoyances when you’re dropped into the heart of a dark, velvet-seat sea, a live orchestra filling every inch of open space with tremendous, physical sound. Jon is quite looking forward to losing himself in it, content to put any and all disruptions to the sheer bliss in the heady atmosphere of a concert hall entirely out of his mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wow, i sure wonder where that guy was going!
> 
> i really wanted to acknowledge jon's experimentation with not only his own culture but with gender expression and identity; his labels may not stay this way forever, but it's important to try things on and things absolutely shift and adjust depending on your environment and support system. he as a transfeminine nonbinary person who loves women absolutely has access to the femme identity, even if he doesn't use it later! we've all tried things on that didn't quite fit in the long run, and that's okay. it doesn't diminish the period of time where we felt that it described our experience best. i think he deserves to try things on and find himself over time!
> 
> catch me on tumblr @[gerrydelano](http://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/) ofc!
> 
> \+ **saree references:** [this is the pink and gold design, and the way he's draped it](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/748375153800380467/748620403966214265/2351sr07-407.png)  
> \+ [the choli top he's wearing is navy blue like this](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/748375153800380467/748620812990283827/banarasi-silk-pink-saree-with-navy-blue-blouse-20639-800x1100.png)!   
> \+ and [ this art of him by @neela-chan](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/627831543260446720/), who helped me to incorporate more of jon's indian heritage into this story to begin with!  
> \+ also, if you're at all curious, leo and alma are OCs that i introduced in my georgie fic, [breathing like i never did](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22839256/chapters/54585805)! and [the second installment of my hand in hand series](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28700640), which follows old relationships and friendships jon had before the institute.


	8. dead in the water

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He came here for a pack of smokes. Not the staredown before the shoot-out in someone else’s imagination, or the threat of not getting what he needs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> kicking off with gift art that i am still recovering from:  
> \+ [this beautiful jon and georgie from the last chapter](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/615499851897176064/) by @kayleerowena  
> \+ [jon with his tide stick](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/615502110696587264/) by @cuttlefishkitch!  
> \+ and [this HUGE playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1ua2LJjF5DmrqIkc4sYQYc?si=so-Lvc57QK-2h3wfMnkcSg) by @avatarofthebeholding! it's so beautiful, please give a listen and cry with me. 
> 
> thank you guys so much!  
> 
> 
> **CWs in the end notes**

_dead in the water - not going anywhere; brought to a halt_

───── ☆ ─────

Buying cigarettes was never this hard before every 24-hour corner store clerk suddenly knew his face. The news plays on the high-mounted televisions above the counter in a constant loop, and there’s nothing more difficult to ignore than a recent murder.

It’s all anyone wants to talk about these days. Poor old woman skinned in her bookshop, hung out to dry by her own son. Horrifying how cruel young men can be, how violent, how evil. A lot of people seem to forget the word _mistrial_ where it should be tacked onto the end. It’s only interesting if it’s about a twisted family, see, and the only exception that people seem to accept is the idea that the real killer is still out there, if it’s not the sick son. The ungrateful, hateful son. The raised backwards bad seed gone rotten son that not even a mother could love, if she had been given the chance to know who he would turn out to be before he turned a razor on her. Surely, she’d tried her best. Surely, he was what went wrong.

The corner store clerk here seems to know his face. He stalls in reaching around for the requested pack of Marlboros. Reluctant to turn his back or something. Unwilling to completely take his eyes off of the figure in front of him, anticipating a weapon or a reason to press the emergency button fastened to the underside of the counter. Fabricating some reason to be scared, or angry.

Gerard can see a need for justice in his eyes. Justice for the dead old woman skinned in her bookshop, for the destruction of the peaceful life she must have led. Old women who keep bookshops are peaceful, harmless, quiet people who deserve just about anything but being skinned alive. Whoever did it deserves a punishment still uncaptured by any known word in all of humankind’s infinite languages. Who else can the public picture as the culprit but the face in the only mugshot they’d been given? Who but Gerard can shoulder the blame in the absence of answers they can believe?

He came here for a pack of smokes. Not the staredown before the shoot-out in someone else’s imagination, or the threat of not getting what he needs. There is no will in him to stare darkly over the counter in the hopes that it’ll make the guy be quicker about it. All he can do is wait for the opportunity to leave on his own. When it’s given to him, he drops his money on the counter and walks out without his change.

It’s been snowing since last night. The car park has been cleared and salted, grimy slush in puddles remaining in steep asphalt craters. Gerard had nearly snapped his ankle in one on the way in here, and he thinks he could remember where it is if he takes the time to focus on how different things look now after spending the last ten minutes wandering the store. The memory of the squeak of his own wet boots on the tiles inside echoes around in his head as he unboxes a cigarette to light it up, the brick wall behind him a solid thing to lean on.

No telling how long he’ll stand here. Doesn’t do well in cold weather, but the smoke should help about as much as it’ll apparently hurt in the long run. He’ll take a black lung for a slow heart. Least he remembered a scarf this time. Might be enough to keep him upright at least until he thinks of somewhere to go.

There is all at once only one place to go, and absolutely nowhere. Nowhere that he would feel comfortable taking off his jacket, or safe lying down. Nowhere that might let him in without expecting something in exchange. If he goes home, it’s all the same. Every time he runs out of ideas and ends up back on the doorstep of the bookshop, the same night just rewinds itself like some shitty, scratched up VHS to play back around him in loops, inescapable loops, over and over.

Open the door. Kick off his boots. Jacket stays on. Lights stay off. Floorboard creaks no matter what. Chair scrapes whether or not she’s in it. _There’s my Gerard,_ says the dead shark in the dark. _Welcome home._

The sweeter the voice she puts on to say it the deeper it slices right through him. Right through him like a fucking power saw, blurring with metal teeth buried lethal down into the marrow of every overworked bone in his body that dares to try and prevent immediate collapse before he even reaches the staircase.

It makes it feel like he has bones all scattered around inside him where they shouldn’t be, knocked loose from his own skeleton and left to rattle or something foreign snuck in there past his notice. As if that Sanskrit poetry book had been held open over his mouth like a canteen in some fit of desert-driven delirium and he had been too far gone to tell the difference between water and bird ribs, and now some terrible imaginary mythic was using them for bone scrying in the empty bowl of his gut.

Maybe that’s just the shitty, gory allegory he’d come up with to convince himself that where there’s a bone scrying mythic, there’s an answer. That if all of it exists inside of him somewhere, then maybe he can learn to read the bird ribs he’s been forced to swallow without needing to rip himself open in order to see them. Maybe they’ll spell the way out.

This metaphor is manifesting itself as a headache he can feel in his eyes. His brain must have picked up a trick or two from his bones and just dislocated itself from the stem for the fun of it.

Gerard turns his head to cough out smoke and winter mist. The paper box in his hand is emptier than he thinks it should be. He thought he’d dropped it into his pocket, left his hand in there to stay warm, but looking down now he sees that he’s stuck his fingers into the box to feel around for a cigarette that simply isn’t there.

All gone, just like that. Somehow he’d burned through the whole damn pack just standing outside the store. Great.

With how fast the sun sets in December, it’s hard to guess at how long he’s been standing out here just by the colour of the sky. It had been light out when he ended up here, as if that means much. He tries to wrinkle his nose and take inventory of the numbness of his face, but that still doesn’t exactly tell him the time. He could check his phone, but that would require effort that he isn’t willing to expend while his hands are changing colours in the cold. They’ll go in his pockets for now and stay there, until he can unlock his knees enough to step back inside the building.

Now that he’s remembered himself, he almost doesn’t want to try and pull in a deep breath. It’ll make him too aware of the freakish balloon animal that his organs have probably tied themselves into as he stood here, stupid and swaying in the snow like someone who _doesn’t_ have some kind of fucked up blood distribution problem to worry about. He remembers the wall behind him, and remembers to thank it for keeping him from just curling up on the ground and waiting to be ushered off the premises with an industrial broom.

He should feel real shitty for almost wishing he was in that position, he thinks. Then again, he’s already found himself envying everyone who had ever been given twenty-five to life where he hadn’t, so maybe his earthly desires are doomed to be skewed. He doesn’t want to think of how long he’ll think this way. He doesn’t want to think about it.

Gerard takes that deep breath and regrets it. The winter catches stickily in his mouth and combines with the smoke-dry walls of his windpipe like a bad science fair experiment. The round of coughs that follows just about knocks his lights out, lands him with an elbow braced hard against the waist-height bin beside him. Just lucky enough to keep his sleeve from touching to that piece of chewing gum someone had left stuck to the rim. He’ll take that success.

What he needs now is just water. Water that is real water and not bird ribs or blood, just a normal bottle from the wall of refrigerators at the back of the store. He can make it there and back and start over.

There are more people in the store now than he remembers seeing pass him on their way in. He weaves around a teen couple as one of the girls stops the other in the middle of the aisle to fix the way her earmuffs sit over her hair, brushing snowflakes from the curls. To his genuine surprise, they both chirp polite apologies to _him_ when he can’t quite slip past without bumping into one of their shoulders despite how close he pressed himself to the shelf of crackers and trail mix behind him. They must not watch the news.

It takes more restraint than he thought he had in him to _not_ just crack open a water bottle and chug it right then and there, all at once, but he manages. He’d pay for the empty bottle, sure, but the moment in between inciting and abating the clerk’s suspicion wouldn’t be worth it. 

Not much is worth much of anything. Some distant, ages old part of him just wonders whether the water is even worth it. If the bare minimum of self care is worth it. If he should go out and find someone who would value the scarf around his neck more than he does and hand it off to them. Maybe that should be where he goes after this. Maybe that’d be worth more than keeping it just so he can survive long enough to get back to a home he would rather freeze than spend another night in.

He drifts over to the tail end of the queue at the counter and rests his elbow next to a shelf of Flakes and Wispas. He might consider the temptation of the Crunchie bar right in front of him if his mind didn’t immediately play hopscotch from _honeycomb_ to _hivesong_ to _Filth._ Sometimes eating is a lot harder than it should be. It isn’t fair.

The queue moves slower than he thinks it should. Not much to call fair or unfair about that, but he’s not sure whether it says something about his concept of time or not. He’d lost at least an hour smoking outside before, and now he can’t seem to get rid of the _seconds_ drilling into the muscles strapped across his shoulder blades. His pulse beats with a clock he can’t hear over the television, the jangle of the door as it opens again with a gush of freezing air that reaches him somehow across the distance.

The jangle doesn’t stop ringing when the door closes. Gerard opens his eyes to see that it’s because the woman who had walked in had brought bells with her — a literal stalk of jingle bells — and is shaking them deliberately as she walks to the head of the queue and tap the man buying three cartons of orange juice on the shoulder with persistence.

“Two days ‘til Christmas,” the bellringer announces. “Don’t forget the reason for the season!”

She presents him a peppermint stick with a notecard tied onto it with a piece of ribbon. The man takes it with a mumble and returns to his transaction, stuffing the thing into his pocket with his wallet. The woman moves down the queue, smiling cheerily when the teenage girls pass by her on her other side and turning to catch them. They each take a peppermint stick with hardly-stifled smiles, one of them deepening her voice to deliver a “Praise Jesus” in manufactured baritone before her girlfriend bursts into a fit of giggles behind her.

As she gets closer to his place in the queue, Gerard watches the man in front of him stiffen up. His shoulders draw as he turns his back to the situation, curling slightly over the counter as if to huddle around his intended purchases. When she audaciously _knocks_ on his back like it’s a door, he flinches, and turns rigidly around with no shortage of discomfort in his sigh. 

A dull, protective instinct turns up in Gerard’s chest like a leak sprung. He’s almost inclined to tell her to leave the guy alone, but it’s too late. It only takes about five seconds of awkward conversation for her to move onto him next, and he takes the peppermint stick without a fuss. He nods at her and she brushes past him, repeating her chipper nonsense to people floating around in the aisles. The guy shakes off his bristles and faces forward. Gerard sways back against the counter.

The queue moves up. The leak patches itself. He’s got a free peppermint stick now, and nothing matters all that much.

His gaze finds the green jacket of the person in front of him again and nestles in the fabric for a long, absent moment. Guy’s thin, not too tall. Round his age. Pretty hair. It would be the easiest thing in the world for Gerry to just bend forward like one of those sippy bird toys and rest his head right there on the shoulder not so far from his face. Height’s about right. It’d be easy, if he knew him.

Maybe he doesn’t have to know him. Maybe he could skip choosing a bar to find someone that would let him do that, and just catch this guy outside. He can’t be going anywhere too special with the box of tissues and the tub of peanut butter he’s buying. Gerard hears him speak out a request for a pack of Marlboros, and he almost finds himself aching. Some pathetic, Hallmark movie aching about shared habits that reduce the risk factors for disgust, conversation starters that could lead to a warm bed if he’s lucky. What are the chances this guy is just as lonely in the wintertime, and that he doesn’t have a ghost at home? What are the chances he doesn’t watch the news?

It’s the exhaustion. It’s the snow. It’s the dead shark in the dark and a frantic desperation to stop bleeding in the water. To bleed somewhere else instead, if only figuratively.

Gerard acknowledges distantly how entirely out of his mind he must be to be suddenly so consumed with how much he just wants to lay his head down somewhere that he starts daydreaming about strangers like that. It would be smarter to stick to wanting another pack of cigarettes for when he needs them later, as he’s so certain he will. The guy steps aside with his things and Gerard drags himself to stand in front of the register again.

The clerk eyes him the same way that he did when he was in here earlier. Looks a fraction of a second away from demanding to know what the hell he’s doing back here. He doesn’t, but he’s decidedly brusque about fetching another two packs of cigarettes when Gerard decides it’d be better to plan ahead.

Gerard isn’t sure just _who_ the spite is for when he snatches up that Crunchie bar and tosses it onto the counter anyway. Maybe he deserves it about as much as the clerk does. Maybe he just needs to at least try and keep training himself out of the disgust that comes with scraping his tongue along something honeycombed and full of little holes, train himself out of believing that something vile and teeming will come spilling out when he bites down too close to the heart of it. If anything is going to kill him one of these days, it probably won’t be a chocolate bar. His blood sugar could probably use it, too.

As he finally turns towards the door with his plastic bag, he realizes with a start that the guy in the green jacket hasn’t left the store yet. He jolts more than Gerard does when they come almost face to face, like he’d been waiting there on purpose, dawdling with novelty keychains and Kinder eggs to kill time until Gerard was finished at the register.

The speed at which Gerard’s heart lodges itself in his throat at the thought is alarming and sad. It’s moments like this he’s glad that his hair is long enough to hide behind like a curtain; a swell of earnest hope like that has no business showing on his face.

Green jacket guy doesn’t seem to see it. He fidgets with his bag, reaching around in his pockets like he’s lost something.

“I-I didn’t want to interrupt, but I— I’m, um…”

He holds out a ribbon-wrapped peppermint stick towards Gerard in offering, his slender fingers clay brown and undamaged. Gerard is left keenly aware of the coldcolour that hasn’t been warmed out of his own hands yet when he numbly reaches up to take it, the contrast between them as sharp as the weather outside. He finds himself distracted by the blue of his own veins pressed up into winterbitten pink, his focus darting and drifting and dizzy with sleeplessness that only ever seems to catch up to him when he’s faced with people who probably expect him to be able to speak. To at least look up at them.

This guy doesn’t really seem to give a shit, or even notice. He just keeps talking, albeit as he walks himself backwards towards the door.

“I’m not really one for Christmas,” he explains, “o-or peppermint? And it would be wasteful to just throw it out. So… yes, well. Ah. Happy— happy holidays.”

Gerard manages to rasp a suitably audible _yeah_ before he’s gone, just like that. The sound of the word mostly serves to remind him that he’d just smoked an entire pack of cigarettes and still has yet to wash the taste out of his mouth. The split-second green jacket longing from before sweeps through his head to redefine itself as the pipe dream it really was, with it the full scope of its impracticality.

Would have been shitty to stop him outside in shallow want of a kiss while he’s like this, all smoky and dehydrated and stupid. Couldn’t even work up the strength to play charming long enough to see if he might stand a chance. Didn’t even get a look at his face.

Gerard slips back outside into the snow and takes a moment to uncap his water. He assumes his position against the wall again and takes his time relearning for the thousandth time how he needs to be better about hydration. He needs to sit down somewhere. He can’t loiter here forever. He can’t let himself glance around the car park and wonder which one is green jacket guy’s. That’d be weird or something, probably. Definitely. Not that Gerard’s really got much of a say in what his brain decides to latch onto when he’s trying to forget everything else. 

So much for a shoulder. Could have been nice, maybe, if he had the nerve. Could have been awful, too, though. Guy did seem sort of jumpy. High strung. 

For that reason, of course, Gerard considers letting himself properly picture some make-believe universe where he learns the story behind the stress. In a nice flat somewhere far away from Pinhole Books, where he’s the one who gets trusted with the babbling woes that follow counterfeit intimacy and doesn’t just fall apart himself. Where he gets away with flipping the escapist’s hourglass that sets the limits of his imaginary freedoms back over just once before he overstays his welcome. Before he has to stop existing again, because he’s not exactly designed for being wanted past sunrise. Maybe another world beyond even that where he could be, or something. A third one, perhaps, where none of it starts in a convenience store and he’s not this pathetic, and could maybe believe comfort has the potential to make sense.

Gerard can’t even really regret letting his mind wander like that. It’s not as if there’s much else that’s any better to think about. He needs _something_ that isn’t snow and smoke and dead sharks. Not like he’ll ever see the guy again, anyway. What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. Good for him.

Gerard should have bought two water bottles. This one emptied itself too fast. The idea of going back inside and facing the clerk a third time just to get another is almost worse than standing here needing one.

Oh, well. Nothing really matters all that much, and he’s got two peppermint sticks now. His blood sugar could probably use it. Lord only knows when he’ll finally drag himself back home. There are other places to buy water. Places that don’t broadcast the news.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **CWs: mary keay mentions; unhealthy coping mechanisms (smoking, allusions to past hookups); chronic illness; brief suicidal ideation.** so, more or less gerry-typical Not Having A Great Day, But Still Kicking?
> 
> *smiles painfully while i wait for the pitchforks and torches* s-so guys, how we feelin! haha!
> 
> always hanging on tumblr @[gerrydelano](http://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/)!


	9. knock seven bells

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He doesn’t want to be here, but it’s where he’d chosen to be, and he can’t take it back now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we have more fanart!  
> \+ [this adorable swingset nostalgia piece](https://measureyourlifeincake.tumblr.com/post/615654370397323264/) by @measureyourlifeincake  
> \+ and [this gorgeous gerry from the last chapter](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/615678439190626304/) by @treeroutes!
> 
>  **CWs in the end notes** , as well as some additional shout outs, links, and explanations!

_to knock seven bells - the passing of four hours, eight marking the end of a sailor’s shift; an attack to finish someone off_

───── ☆ ─────

At precisely 8:00 p.m., the curtains will rise on a production of _Chess_ that Jonathan Sims is not a part of. He’s been riding various tubes since 5:00, and has no distinct plans to stop until at least 10:30, when the curtains are set to close, and maybe a while after that. Until around when he assumes the afterparty to have died down. Until he can stop thinking about how desperately he wishes he were there instead of here.

It’s his own fault he’s here. He could have gone to the show, his unspoken invitation to that party hadn’t been rescinded. He doesn’t want to be here, but it’s where he’d chosen to be, and he can’t take it back now. If he’s too far away to make it there, then at some point, it’ll stop being a choice. Even if he took the next tube straight back to the station nearest to his theatre, he wouldn’t make it in time for the first act. Jon needs for the option of arriving late to disappear entirely.

The only other option aside from this would have been to sit at home with _Colin,_ and Jon would frankly sooner throw out his other knee. On _purpose._ There’s nothing wrong with Colin, exactly, but forming close emotional bonds with a flatmate you linked up with on Craigslist isn’t exactly in the cards when you’re the type of person who needs to resort to Craigslist to find a flatmate in the first place. Mostly, Jon can’t stand the idea of Colin hearing him cry again.

Again, because of course, it’s happened before. The walls in their flat are thin enough that even locking himself in his room doesn’t completely mask the fact that he’s scarcely been able to hold himself together since getting out of the hospital two weeks ago. Even if he doesn’t make a sound, he can assume that Colin is assuming he’s closed the door so that he could have some kind of meltdown anyway, which is almost worse than actually having one.

He kind of hates Colin. Not because he’s unhygienic or loud or had broken any of the rules that they had set upon subleasing, but because it’s easy. They’re not friends or anything. Hell, he’s not even sure if they ever liked each other to start with. But Colin isn’t awful enough to _not_ insist that Jon stay sitting on the couch instead of forcing himself up onto his crutches to limp into the kitchen and back for a water bottle. He’s not awful enough _not_ to try and help every now and again, and for that, Jon can’t help but resent him. Just a little.

Two weeks wasn’t enough time after surgery to justify trying to hobble around London alone, but he’s always been alone here, hasn’t he? That had been the point. That had been the plan.

He’s only been here since the start of summer. After moving out of Georgie’s, he’d hit a dead end on places to go around Oxford that didn’t just remind him of all of _that,_ and independence had sounded appealing at the time. Sticking around at the university to complete his MSc in Museum Anthropology didn’t have to mean he forced himself to stick around during holiday. He could write his dissertation from London, and commute back to meet with his supervisors and keep track of his progress. It would at least get him moving, give him a routine of sorts. He could find things to occupy himself with when he wasn’t poring over research and presentations. 

Last year, he might have thought that he could occupy that downtime with friends. Things change.

The Natural History Museum of London had no shortage of openings for assistants, and he’d known the layout of it like the back of his hand long before thinking to apply for a job there. Getting to spend his work days in one of his favourite places had seemed like a dream. It’s hardly been work at all. Not like his job at the arcade back in Bournemouth when he was too young to be taken seriously with anything but a broom and a ring of keys so he could refill the ticket dispensers in the games.

Jon prefers not to think about everything that he’d gotten himself into there. The perks involving free after-hours gameplay weren’t worth the pains of being known when so many of his more unpleasant classmates tended to frequent where he worked. When his placement at the top of so many scoreboards became worthless once the pseudonym initials were tied to his face, and all the magic of being a mystery went rotten.

The museum has different perks. Better ones. He doesn’t have an urban legend to maintain here in London that makes the job more stressful. No one there who knows him well enough to use that knowing to hurt him.

Touring people around and telling them every little fact about all the exhibits he loved was hardly a chore; nobody tells you to shut up when they literally sign up to be talked at, to be taught, engaged with, entertained with knowledge and passion for art, and animals, and history. When he’s assigned a class of primary school children, he tends to leave that day all but trembling with happiness. 

Kids always end up loving the Triceratops skull almost as much as Jon does because he has fun facts up his sleeve that aren’t in the brochures. He’s reverse-engineered a whole life story for it based on the divots and trenches carved into the bone, and even cross-checked with a visiting paleontologist to confirm the potential realism. A few far-fetched speculations don’t hurt when he spins that yarn in dynamic stage whispers for wide-eyed 8-year-olds. There’s no way to know the truth of something so long dead, anyway. What matters is caring enough to wonder. There are few things Jon treasures more than watching at least _one_ person get that spark in their eyes that says they'll think about it even after the experience is over.

It’s rewarding. It’s fun. He loves it, he really does. More than he would love sitting in some desk in a dusty archive, or at the counter handing people pamphlets.

Except now sitting at a desk is what’s advisable for someone with such a grievous injury. Walking around a museum all day with very few opportunities to sit isn’t healthy after what he’s done to himself. He was lucky that they’d told him he could come back after he’s recovered enough, but with the way his leg is _throbbing_ with firestreaks of pain from ankle to hip, he can’t imagine it’ll be easy to operate the way he’d gotten used to. 

He’ll need a cane, the doctors said. Every day from now on, he will be presented with the choice between walking with aid or with great pains, and therefore perhaps not at all. That part depends on him. But Jon knows that the moment that he makes that purchase, adjusts it to his height, brings it to the museum with him, mentally accepts that he is reliant on it — those moments will hurt as much as the fall had.

It was stupid, his own damn fault. He can never show his face in that theatre again. Not after all this.

He’d really loved that theatre group, too, he thinks. No, he had. He definitely loved it. _It_ as a larger entity had almost seemed to love him, too, back when he could be a part of it that kept it moving. Only two weeks ago, it had loved him in a way he could almost accept.

_Chess_ is atrocious in concept, and that’s part of why he’d found himself so enamoured by it. A love triangle between championship chess players during the Cold War, written for the stage by members of fucking _ABBA._ Colin had made such a _face_ when Jon had told him what the production was during one of their stilted attempts at maintaining small talk when they accidentally occupied the living room at the same time too long for silence to be entirely comfortable. At the time, Jon had been satisfied with the reaction. It _is_ ridiculous. It’s also tragic, politically allegorical, and has enough poignant musical numbers to balance out the really weird ones. It gave him opportunities that he didn’t know he could ever want so desperately.

He’d initially planned to audition for Anatoly, the Russian challenger. It made enough sense that he would have been happy with it. He enjoys most of his songs. But Michelle Rojas loved them more, and had made a point to sneak up beside him in the line for auditions to nervously whisper that love to him as if asking a question. Something about her wobbling smile had led him to confess that if he _really_ had to choose, could make an honest choice without any consequence, he would far prefer to play Florence.

Her eyes had lit up with something he recognized, that ached a bit to think about. He’d wondered if he should have guessed given the fact that everyone calls her Mickey.

The director had been a lot quicker to agree to letting them try out for the roles they really wanted than Jon had thought he’d be. He and Mickey had run out into the hallway to lose their minds about switching the songs they were trying out with, to check each other’s pitch. She’d actually hugged him before running in when her name was called. Wished him luck when she came back, breathless with adrenaline, and sent him in for his turn.

Somehow, Jon had found himself in possession of a role that he could scarcely _think_ about without a very physical shudder of anxious, _terrified_ longing. He almost wondered if the director had only given them the roles just to avoid accusations of discrimination. Maybe he had been just that intrigued by their ambitions, and just wanted to see if they could pull it off. Just to be different. Jon found it hard to believe he’d really earned it. Mickey swore he had, but it was probably her job as his love interest to ensure he wouldn’t screw up their stage dynamic. 

The vocal demands were difficult, and he was far from a mezzo-soprano, but their group was the sort to dive heartfirst into uncharted territory, and the orchestra they worked with had no issue with the adapted sheet music once the necessary solos had been adjusted. One of the baritone saxophone players, Amir, had just celebrated his fourth year on testosterone, and was quite adept at composition. The entire scramble for compromise had made Jon feel more loved than he has in…

Well, it feels like it’s been longer than it really has. He hasn’t spoken to Georgie what feels more like years than the few months it’s been, or her friends. They were her friends more than his. He’d always known it. It had only been a matter of time, really, and after the mess that he’d made of everything, Jon isn’t surprised that they haven’t reached out to him. Not like he’d reach out to them first. Not like they won’t forget him eventually. Not like he won’t be fine.

_Nobody’s Side_ is playing in his earphones and he wishes it wasn’t. He wishes he didn’t know every word, but more than that he wishes that the words didn’t make so much sense. Even more than they had when he was first learning the songs and thinking about the hollow friendlessness of secondary school, of losing the few he’d made in university.

_Better learn to go it alone,_ _  
_ _Recognize you're out on your own._ _  
_ _Nobody's on nobody's side._

Mickey had been on his side, probably. For the first six weeks of rehearsals, she’d glued herself to him and he’d let her. He thinks he probably enjoyed it about as sincerely as he could have while she just kept reminding him of things and people and places and pains as much as she kept him distracted. He thinks he really liked the way she’d look at him while they sang their duets. Even the ones where they were supposed to be fighting. When he sang coyly, _“So I am not dangerous then? What a shame,”_ and she returned with such earnest, _“No, you’re not dangerous. Who could think that of you?”_

Sometimes, it felt real. Like she meant it, or something. He’d found himself near tears while watching her perform _Anthem_ enough times that he may have tricked himself into thinking she meant something more to him than he can allow her to now that he’s scared her off.

Jon had let her come visit him every now and then at her insistence, but the more often she did, the more he realized that they had nothing in common aside from the show. That might not have been a problem if it didn’t hurt so much to talk about. He’d muscled through it for the first week, but her visits dwindled after the first time he snapped at her to change the subject from whether or not Lois Peabody could hold a high G for as long as she liked to say she could. She claimed once that she hadn’t stopped by in a while because she thought Colin was sort of uncomfortable to be around, but Jon knew it was because his entire disposition had changed. That was the point. That was the plan. 

She’d been the one to come running when he fell. It was such a stupid, miserable, mundane little fall; or it might have been to someone with stronger ankles. He’d been walking offstage — _walking,_ not running, not jogging, just _walking_ — and he’d been two steps from the ground, _two steps,_ when—

The tube screeches to a stop in front of him. Jon doesn’t know how long he’s been slumped on his crutches on the platform, but at least it’s over now. People shove ahead of him to get through the doors first and that’s just fine. He clacks his way into the compartment when he finds an opening on his own.

This whole “ride around on the tube until the dead of night” thing had started feeling like a bad idea around 6:45, but it feels especially unwise now that he’s found himself in a compartment so crowded that there are more people standing up than sitting down. There are bodies pressing in behind him, trapping him badly enough that he can’t even consider turning around to get off.

Just as he starts to consider how to change grime grey into at least _somewhat_ of a silver lining (if there are so many people standing, then it’ll be harder to fall over, naturally) someone taps him on the elbow. The woman points towards a window when she gets his attention, alerting him to the way that someone had stood up from their seat to make room for him.

Jon swallows something hot and bitter. No one is fighting for the seat because he’s been singled out as the sad idiot on crutches who needs it more than any of the rest of them. He’s been spotted, has been assessed, and presented with an expectation that he wants more than anything to fail in meeting. Now that this is the circumstance by which a seat has become available, he doesn’t want it.

He almost has a mind to tell the person to sit back down, but they’ve turned to curl around a stanchion so heavily that it almost looks like they’re preparing to fall asleep there while they wait for their own stop. Jon squeezes through the crowd and all but trips into the seat, biting back on the hiss of pain that threatens to alert everyone in the tube that they’d been right about him. Holding back on it just makes his lungs hurt, but no one should think anything of a long sigh. He’s owed that, he thinks. 

The one who had stood up for him doesn’t respond to the thanks he mutters. Good. He already likes them a lot more than that woman, currently tossing him a simpering smile as if she’d actually _worried_ about him in the time it took to cross from her to here. She needn’t pretend. It’s insulting. He balances his crutches between his legs and crosses his arms, irritation pressing at every inch of his skin from the inside.

_One Night In Bangkok_ isn’t what he wants to be listening to, though, so he eventually reaches for his iPod to change it. _Nobody’s Side_ begins again.

_What's going on around me_ _  
_ _Is barely making sense;_ _  
_ _I need some explanations fast._

Maybe he could cope better if he’d fallen clean off the stage, but no. No, he hadn’t been that lucky. He’d almost been on the ground. He’d been so close, and it hadn’t mattered. Once his ankle had decided to roll, it didn’t make a difference how far he’d fall. All that mattered was the way he landed, and as it were, he’d landed badly. Badly enough that he hardly remembers it now but for lights popping in front of his eyes, the feeling that all the oxygen had been ripped out of his body down to a cellular level, all at once.

Somehow, he’d still had enough air left in his lungs to let out a scream. A real scream like he hadn’t let out in probably his entire life, because for all the dislocations he’s had, he’d never dislocated his knee so grotesquely that he could see it through his trousers. He’d never dislocated his knee at _all,_ and he’d been thankful for it because he knew enough about his own connective tissue to know that this is the sort of dislocation he could not ever hope to set by himself. He hadn’t been prepared for the pain of it. He hadn’t absorbed it with grace.

Mickey had leapt down from the stage and he remembers with disgust that he’d cried in her arms when she reached him. That he’d gasped and sobbed and babbled in panic that he’d just gone and snapped his leg entirely, in a way that terrified him for the future, in a way that felt final and damning. He remembers the look on her face when she’d peered down at the damage, the shake in her voice when she demanded for someone to call 999. Her acting skills fled entirely when she tried to pretend she wasn’t repulsed by seeing a limb bent so visibly out of place. When she told him it would be alright, she didn’t believe it any more than he did.

Other people clustered around to fret over him and he shut his eyes to all of them, to the director when he parted them like the Red Sea and yelled for them to give him some space. The shine of sympathetic tears in more than one bystander’s gaze should have made Jon feel at least a little less like a child for his reaction, but it didn’t.

The hospital had insisted that an emergency procedure was necessary, or else he’d be at serious risk for permanent damage. He could not repair tendons and ligaments with the same ease that he readjusts his wrists by hand, couldn’t relieve the blood vessels and nerves that were crushed by the misalignment as easily as he cracks his shoulders. It’s different. It’s worse.

He had to call dadima for medical information that he didn’t have on hand, in his memory. She’d insisted on coming up to the hospital herself, and Jon had dreaded every moment of waiting for her to get there. He tried not to think of how long it’d been since he’d seen her. For the past while, he’s been spending the important holidays with friends. He hadn’t gone home for Pesach, and so dadima took a trip to Israel to see uncle Ira.

That means it might have been since his production of _Hamlet,_ a good year ago at least. Landing that role had set him off flapping his arms so hard that he threw out a wrist, but at least he’d had Georgie to help him set it again. It had been such a competitive audition, a show so dear to him that he’d broken his silence to request that dadima come up and see it, if she wasn’t busy. If she could stand to get on a train and bother.

She had come, of course, and she had come again now. He wouldn’t have asked her to come see him in _Chess._ The thought of her seeing him as— No. No, it’s better that she had witnessed his expulsion from it than the show itself. He hadn’t expected the relief that came with seeing her face before he was to go in for any major procedures. Hadn’t expected to fall apart the minute she swept across the room to get her arms around him, to sniffle into her blouse when she kissed his hair and said _oh, my boy._ He hadn’t expected her to say something like that, or to feel such a potent mixture of familiar comfort and appalling, powerful revulsion at the word. No, he couldn’t have asked her to come see him in _Chess._

The leftover haze of anesthesia is the only reason he didn’t burst into tears again the minute he woke up after surgery. It took until it faded for the pain of it all to climb back up his throat in a way he couldn’t ignore; the pain of more than just the entire length of his leg, but of just how easily everything he’d been so carefully balancing had fallen apart. It took until he convinced dadima to go down to the canteen for something to eat to let himself feel it.

The bile-rise of pure heartbreak reduced him to cracking sobs that came and went until a nurse came by to tell him that he had visitors. It was hard not to just start back up again when Mickey poked her head into the room, a balloon in the shape of a teddy bear floating in above her. Six other familiar faces poured in after her and crowded around his bed, and Jon wanted very distinctly to disappear.

It was Amir who sat down on the edge of it and pulled Jon forward into his arms, and apologized for the loss. The sort of crying he did then just felt weird, because he couldn’t tell if it was out of grief or love or what. All he knew for certain was that it was mortifying, that he wished he wasn’t doing it, that they weren’t seeing it, that this wasn’t happening.

This cannot be happening. He can’t have spent his youth learning how to put himself back together just to take an injury he can’t just pop back in place like a habit. He can’t have dragged himself to London to work at his favourite museum only for the job to be stripped of its comfort. He can’t have lost Georgie just to lose the things she taught him, too.

Mickey’s a nice girl, but she’s not his best friend. Amir comes a little closer to understanding, but he’s never been in the position of potentially being laughed off stage for looking wrong in an evening gown. Jon couldn’t explain to them what he’d just had so brutally taken from him.

A wave of disgust draws Jon’s arms tighter over his chest as the person sitting to his left presses closer to him. The tube has just stopped and the amount of people who got off did not outmatch the number of people who stepped on in their place, it would seem. Someone had decided to make a seat out of a sliver of space and it resulted in the entire row squishing tighter together to compensate. Jon has never thought about what it might feel like to be a sardine in a can until this moment, and he regrets letting it enter his mind.

His own shoulder is pressed flush to the hip of the person who had stood up for him. They don’t seem to mind; they haven’t moved to press closer to the wall on their other side or anything, or shoved him away. Jon keeps his head low. Tries to pretend it isn’t happening. No need to make a fuss and acknowledge it. It’s no one’s fault, except maybe the git who had disrupted the whole row.

He realizes belatedly that he’s been so busy grousing that he missed half of the song playing in his earphones. Stiffly reaching for his iPod to start it over was a mistake; his eyes catch on the time at the top of the screen. 

8:07. It’s started. He could start the soundtrack over and begin again, follow along with the proper order of things and play it out in his head. The thought of doing so makes his throat close up with rage, and something else. He just presses rewind on _Someone Else’s Story_ a second time.

He likes Svetlana’s songs as much as Florence’s. The girl who had her role was talented enough to have made him cry during her solo, too. It occurs to Jon now that he’s spent quite a lot of this past summer on the precipice of tears.

_I could be in someone else's story,_ _  
_ _In someone else's life,_ _  
_ _And he could be in mine._ _  
_ _I don't see a reason to be lonely;_ _  
_ _I should take my chances_ _  
_ _Further down the line._

She had been sweet about the key change to their duet. Adaptable. Accommodating. He felt pitied, a bit, no matter how he tried to believe everyone when they said that they were excited for the challenge that came with every adjustment they were making. Sometimes it felt that the whole thing hinged on him. If he did something wrong, then all of the changes would have been for nothing. His understudy would have done better with the original key.

That’s part of why he couldn’t bear the idea of going to see the show. He doesn’t want to know if they scrambled to put everything back to the way it was before he’d ruined it, or if they kept all the changes and just used them without him. He can’t decide which is worse. Both possibilities hurt almost more than his leg does. He can’t uncross his arms to knead at the sore muscles of his thigh while there is someone pressed right up against him. 

His lungs tighten as if gripped by a cold fist. He can’t hear himself breathe over his music.

It would have been a bad idea. Rehearsals were hard enough sometimes; his voice would crack on a high note he wasn’t meant to hit, and he’d cringe himself out of character. Or worse, he’d hit a high note perfectly and feel eyes on the back of his neck from backstage that weren’t even there. Even when people grinned and clapped and praised him, something in the very back of his head whispered wickedly that it was all a lie. That the moment the curtains pulled back on opening night, he’d go from Florence Vassy to Carrie at the prom. He doesn’t know who in the world would do that to him or why, but it didn’t stop the fear. It didn’t stop him squinting into the stage lights up into the rafters for the bucket of blood that would ruin his costume and kill what dignity he could maintain while playing the part of a woman onstage in front of however many strangers in the audience wouldn’t understand.

When he wore a saree to that concert in Dublin, he’d been safe with Georgie and Leo (and perhaps most importantly, Alma) surrounding him. He could get away with femininity when he didn’t open his mouth to speak and reveal himself, but he doesn’t have them now. He doesn’t have anything but himself here. There would have been no one special in the audience giving him a thumbs up about it when he thought he heard someone snicker at the sight of him.

He has to believe that it’s better this way, or it’ll kill him. The blessing in disguise in the fall has to be that it had stopped him from making the mistake of being a part of that show. It didn’t have to be that something was ripped out from under him, torn out of his hands just when he’d thought it might not go off like a bomb after all.

It had been foolish to think he could have made it. That it could have made him braver now that he’s by himself.

The tube gives a jolt that might have sent him flying if he hadn’t accepted the seat when it was given up for him. Jon knows this because the person who had given it up stumbles away from the metal pole they’re hanging onto. He flinches when a leather-clad forearm comes down onto his shoulder for balance, and in spite of himself, his first thought is of Georgie.

If it were Georgie sitting where he is, she’d crack a joke about it and make an outright offer to be an armrest for the rest of the journey. She’d let the person lean on her because clearly, they need it just as much as Jon had needed the seat. Jon wonders how badly this person might have needed it, too. There’s a frailty to the weight on him. The person doesn’t lift their arm even after the tube stabilizes, and so there must be a reason.

Jon decides against giving them one to let up. The silver lining here can be… situational deep pressure, perhaps. That’s better than calling it ‘uncomfortable contact in an enclosed space.’ It sounds more productive. His body reacts far better to the idea of it. He has to think of it that way, or he’ll disassemble. He’s spent so much of this summer on the precipice of tears. He’s still there, and he doesn’t want to be.

When the first notes of _Heaven Help My Heart_ begin, though, what he wants doesn’t really matter all that much. Trying to swallow only alerts him to how clogged up his throat already is, must have been for quite some time as he sat here dwelling and remembering and loathing and grieving and listening, masochistically, to songs that he would be singing right now if he had just done things a little differently. If he’d been more careful going down those steps. If he’d just been born with better bones.

_What if he saw my whole existence_ _  
_ _Turning around a word, a smile, a touch?_

Jon peers over to the side at the hand hanging over his shoulder. The most he can make out is chipped, black nail polish, and the trembling almost-curl of pale fingers. Thin bands of silver nestle on either side of the knuckles on the index, ring and little fingers; ring splints. A spark of recognition that makes him want to pop his own fingers is put out swiftly by the wave of guilt that follows. It sweeps over him like the breakers that used to take him out at the knees when he dared to wade too close to the water’s edge at the beach back home. The ones that reminded him of how weak he’s always been, how weak he still is, and now how selfish. 

He shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t have made this person give up the seat. He shouldn’t be in London, or at the very least he shouldn’t have thought he could handle an extracurricular while he did useful things that could have contributed to his future. If he hadn’t joined that group, he wouldn’t have hurt his damn leg and jeopardized his job and education. If he hadn’t uprooted the very _composition_ to the score and then made it all _worthless_ by doing something so _stupid_ as taking a fall, then the show wouldn’t have suffered even a momentary lapse in togetherness. If he’d never gotten involved, invested, hopeful, if he’d just—

The sob tumbles out before he can draw it back in. It must have been louder than he could hear past his music, because a few people turn their heads to look at him before he has the sense to jam his sleeve up against his mouth and bend forward against his crutches. He can’t bring himself to knock an earbud out of place so he can monitor himself, horrified and yearning now for pure denial. It hits him very suddenly that he doesn’t even know where he is right now. He is reminded with tremendous certainty that he has made himself very, very alone.

It’s a bit before he registers that there is a hand curled deliberately around his shoulder where the pressure of a forearm used to be. He’s almost too busy trying not to let himself rock and draw more attention to himself, too concerned with keeping his voice down. He feels the shallow gasp scrape down his own throat, the staggering attempt at breathing it back out. The weight of the touch comes down heavier than it has any right to, given how placid it is. Jon has no right to cry harder, as the gesture was probably intended to get him to stop altogether. Stop making a scene, a fool of himself. Making himself some stranger’s problem by sheer proximity.

How can he just sit here and _do_ this? Why can’t he stop? 

Worse, how can this person still be touching him? It’s not a stationary touch anymore. The hand on his shoulder had slipped around to his back, tracing a tentative, awkward shape into his jacket that Jon could swear is digging down into his skin, carving trenches with all the unnecessary gentleness that he shouldn’t be so hungry for. It’s undeserved. They don’t even know each other. There’s no reason for this; the only explanation that Jon can come up with is pity again. Some weird, humanitarian obligation that says more about the person doing the patting than about whether Jon has any business feeling genuinely consoled by it.

When the gentle touch becomes a nudge, Jon lets himself be moved by it. There’s room to his left now that hadn’t been there before. The person sitting there has shied away. Revolted, no doubt. Disturbed. Uncomfortable with expressions of— of any kind, probably. Between them and the person leaning so heavily on his other side now, Jon is certain that they’re right to feel that way.

The hand on his back becomes a forearm again, a hard elbow digging into a sore spot on his spine when the tube shakes and shudders once more. Jon’s arm is no longer pressed firmly to the side of the person’s leg but rather their ribs when they all but collapse into the seat. Their ribs are moving wrong; stuttering, almost heaving. Through the corner of his eye Jon can see them gripping at their chest with the hand not fisted in his jacket, their long hair fallen in wisps over their shoulder to hide their face. Jon presses his sleeve down harder against his mouth to keep back the feeble sound of horror and shame building in his throat, but it must have come out anyway. The person’s hand unclenches from his jacket and goes back to tracing shaky, absent shapes.

Jon can’t wrap his head around this. He should hate this, being touched by a stranger on the tube. It’s invasive, it’s rude, it’s presumptuous, it’s everything he realizes now that he needs and that much more. It’s awful, and he can’t bring himself to sit up and pull away. He’s being just as outrageous by leaning into it, by _curling closer,_ greedily seizing this opportunity to hide from all the other judgmental eyes around him. He can’t pull back yet. Not while there is a hand tracing gentle trenches into his back and he can’t stop thinking about Georgie and Mickey and _Chess_ and permanent disability long enough to pull himself together.

Jon doesn’t know why it feels like this is all he’ll ever get. Mickey would have probably given him this. Hell, she might have genuinely _liked_ him, for all he knew. It honestly felt that way when she would look him directly in the eye and sing, _‘And you ask me why I love her through wars, death, and despair.’_ As if he were not only the recipient of her love but also the person who cast doubt upon it, and she was trying to convince him of his worth. Like they truly had been communicating through clandestine codewords, and he hadn’t just imagined it after all.

It was always when she sang, _‘How could I leave her? Where would I start?’_ that his eyes began to burn. The music would crescendo, and her voice would fill the theatre, and Jon would have to look away.

Something about maybe being liked by a girl who just left her identity at “gay” made something twist so happily in his heart that he was inclined to reject it before wondering if it could be called affirmation, or really _anything_ but a weird loophole. Some way of seeing him incorrectly, or too correctly. Seeing someone else, or seeing everything he didn’t want to see yet. He could have given her a chance, and instead— instead—

Instead he’s letting himself feel _calmer_ as a complete stranger whose face he hasn’t even looked up at moves their hand from his shoulder blade to the back of his head. It’s a messy touch, the unfamiliarity in it so _clear_ in its brevity, in the way it drops before he even thinks to become guarded again. Thoughtless, distant, but— but—

But that’s when it makes the most sense to stop crying. Jon wipes his face on his sleeve, stays hidden against his crutches in front of him. If the person has said anything at all, he’ll have missed it thanks to his earphones. He should take at least one side off. He knows he should. But then he’d have to hear the tube, the screech of the rails, the buzz of the lightbulbs, the silence of the crowd. Too much. Too awful, too contradictory, too…

It won’t be music. Maybe music is what hurts the most right now, but that’s still what he wants. Get it all out now and get to be empty later.

The arm is now slung around his back like he’s known this person for years, their hand dangling over his opposite shoulder now. Jon strains for another look at the nail polish. Very chipped, yes, and the nails themselves are bitten as short as Jon’s are. Stress, then. Yet another reason that they shouldn’t have been standing for so long. A reason for Jon to let them continue leaning on him until the tube finally stops somewhere that they can get off.

No, not they. They’re not here together, going to the same place. That’s ridiculous. They haven’t even said a word.

Oh, G-d. Oh, G-d, wait a minute.

Jon’s jaw tightens on a swell of renewed horror. No, no, no, no, he cannot have just done something so humiliating in public, _again._ Not that he’s ever cried all over a complete stranger on the tube before, but lately it seems all he’s capable of doing is making a spectacle of himself. Putting on exactly the kind of shows that he’s always had _nightmares_ about, and in exchange for what? The one he’d let himself dream of for a while? 

He can’t even think about _Chess_ right now. The music in his ears warps into the sound of his own heartbeat shouting at him to run as fast as he can with one working leg, to get out of here before the person with the gentle trenchcarving hands actually tries to peer forward at his face and— 

What, identify him? Recognize him? Hardly a chance, here in London. He doesn’t know anyone in London outside of the theatre and the museum. There’s no way that this fit could be pinned on him by name.

He doesn’t want to see the person’s face, either. That could only end badly. And besides, it would ruin the mystery. The weird, sore bit of magic present here that people write poetry about in journals they’ll never show anyone. Like he won’t do, he’s pretty sure, because he’s never been a fan of putting down his feelings like that. He isn’t even sure what he’d say about this. He probably couldn’t do it justice; he’s already having a hard time remembering exactly how this all felt. Why he’d put himself through it in the first place.

Better he get off at the next stop. It’s the least he can do after hogging that seat for so long, after making this person an unwitting participant in the farcical display he’d imposed on everyone in the compartment. 

Everyone left in the compartment, anyway; how many stops had they passed while he kept his head down? It’s emptier now. There are empty seats. The person could have chosen anywhere else to get their heart rate right instead of staying pressed up against him, and Jon has no idea what he’s supposed to do with that information. The thunderbeat that picks up in his own heart can’t be trusted. Traitorous, is what it is. Absurd.

The only thing he can think to do is unzip his rucksack to wrestle around inside it. His fingers find the plastic bottle he wants and he hates that it’s so warm, but it’ll have to be enough. He knows better than to try forcing himself out of the nonverbal spell. He has nothing else to offer in place of thanks, or an apology. Jon plucks one earbud out of place, finally, just in case.

The water bottle changes hands quietly once he holds it under the person’s line of sight. They haven’t lifted their head yet, either. Their fingertips are cold when they brush his hand. They seem almost too tired to do anything with the water other than hold it limply over their lap. The mumbled _thanks_ just makes him hate even more that he’d accepted anything from them first.

When the tube slows to its next halt, Jon finally gets a grip on his crutches to pull himself up. The arm around him falls away like a sandcastle in high tide. No resistance. No fight.

The pain that lances through his leg is almost enough to make him nauseous, to make him stumble, but that’s why he’s got two crutches. There are fewer shoes he could accidentally squish with them when he snaps one out to catch himself and stabilize. There. Safe. Alright.

No one reaches to help him and he’s quite thankful for it, in a pissed off sort of way. Good. He’s been reassessed, this time as someone who is not to be approached. Not to be acknowledged.

Not to be followed. Jon makes a point not to look over his shoulder and see whether the person stays slumped in their seat, or is trying to get off at the same stop. As quickly as he can manage with how horribly weak his arms suddenly feel, he makes his way onto the platform to look for a sign, any sign that’ll tell him just how far he’d let himself drift. Some part of him doesn’t even want to waste the time in looking and just get as far away from the tracks as possible first. The urge to run is stronger than he thinks it should be, and certainly more convoluted than he can ever explain to another living person without making an idiot of himself.

It’s that weird, sore bit of magic sticking in his head. It’s that stupid, dramatic, miserable part of his idiot theatre brain that wonders if there’s some possibility that the person on the train might have some of that to contend with later, too. If they ever write poetry in journals they’ll never show anyone. If he’ll make it onto a page. 

Georgie would make fun of him for playing out some janky mockup of Cinderella and tease about how there’s no way his bizarre imaginary underground prince would be able to find him via disposable water bottle, even if he _had_ carved a stupid doodle of a duck into the cap with a paperclip. That he’s not really writing fairytales for himself at all if what he’s really after is just another thing to regret, or pity himself for losing. That if he really wanted to be remembered or written about, he should have at least tried to say _thank you for trying to comfort me._

Jon is sure that he would have a spectacularly scathing response were that conversation to ever actually take place. For now he’s just fixated on telling the imaginary Georgie in his mind that he’s not too sure the person would even be keen on the “prince” title anyway, which renders her imaginary point entirely moot.

His mind is still in too many places at once. He really is just thinking of himself.

When he stops around a corner to catch his breath, Jon pulls his iPod out of his pocket to tap around for a song in his play history. He wants to hear it again, one more time. He’d missed most of it the first time, and it feels uncomfortable to continue through the soundtrack with gaps in between. It feels like forgetting something important, some piece that the story won’t make any sense without. Jon’s always hated that feeling. Pressing rewind where he can is the very smallest placebo, but at least it’s something he can control when he remembers how far back he wants to go.

And maybe he just wants to hear the song again because now he has fodder for a mental montage to go with it. 

Jon wedges his crutches under his arms and cups his hands over his ears, shuts his eyes to listen as he finally lets himself rock through the last electric remnants of the breakdown left in his system. The brick wall behind him catches on his jacket, hurts his tailbone when he bounces back against it, but he can’t care. He couldn’t do this in front of witnesses that couldn’t walk away from him. Even having cried some of it out, there’s still too much left inside that needs its freedom. It helps him listen to the song. Helps him retain, focus, think.

_Maybe it's best to love a stranger_ _  
_ _Well, that's what I've done —_ _  
_ _Heaven help my heart._

Jon rips his earphones out by the cord. Shame wells up in him like blood from a needle prick. No. No, this needs to stop. There’s no real catharsis in making himself upset on purpose. It doesn’t help to keep twisting the harpoon.

His body wants to give in to the currents of pain that he’s been fighting off, but he can’t slide down the wall to sit if he ever wants to get back up. Not with the clunky, hinged brace on his leg, not without knowing where he _is._ Snatches of the pitiful montage flicker against the new backdrop of cityrush and trainsong filling his head. He drums the heels of his palms against his forehead in feeble reprimand. He lets himself rock until he’s too tired to maintain the stim.

Jon lifts his head and looks up and around him. It’s the only way to reacclimate himself with reality. A line needs to be drawn, and it needs to be drawn now.

And of course, there is no gentle stranger rounding the corner to find him. To see if he’s alright, to ask his name because they would just _itch_ about it if they never found out. Of course there isn’t. Couldn’t be. He’s not that special. 

Jon knows he has never given anyone a good reason to come after him. He would have to be out of his mind to think he’s worth chasing. Not the way he’s been behaving, been thinking. Not when he has to work this hard just to pull himself together. So what if this is one of the worst days of his life? He should have stayed home with fucking _Colin_ and stewed in his grief there instead of silently (and therefore fruitlessly) begging to be seen by anyone _but_ the people he’s been pushing away.

It’s too far, even for him. Even if he knows this is just how his brain decides to punish him when he feels abandoned. He makes up stories. He acts out scenes.

And really, what good is fiction if this is what it does to him? Jon doesn’t suspect he could get this worked up over a good documentary. There’s nothing to project on when it’s a study on tropical fish, or the history of clocktowers. That sort of thing wouldn’t force him to confront things like gender and tenderness and heartbreak and fear. Wouldn’t encourage daydreams about complete strangers on the tube who deserve better than to exist as a plot device in his manufactured personal tragedy. Wouldn’t leave him so susceptible to believing that the simple touch of their hand was the most meaningful thing in the world for a suspended moment in time.

The museum is full of life, with all its bones and ancient things. He can have colour and excitement without letting his imagination run wild like a horse. As of now, it hasn’t cared to shake his spur from where it caught on the saddle when he lost his grip. As of late, he has been letting himself be dragged along the ground by the ankle and he is tired of the dust in his mouth. He is tired of being upside down, and having no real control. Jon can’t remember when he stopped being in control.

Control. He’s lost control of something, and he needs it back. That’s where he should start.

The night air is cool and it soothes his throat when he manages to draw in a deep, cleansing breath. The nausea doesn’t fade, but that’s probably got more to do with the fact that he hadn’t brought food with him when he left for his shitty, pointless adventure. He hadn’t cracked open that water bottle before he gave it away. They needed it more, certainly.

Colin hasn’t texted him or anything. Mickey has, but he hasn’t opened it. No one has touched his elbow to catch his attention, or asked him if he needs help. That’s good. It means they think he can handle himself. There’s probably some social commentary about patronizing the disabled in there somewhere. Jon doesn’t care. He wants to be left alone as much as he wants someone to hold him.

He wants to call Mickey. Tell her that he’s sorry for missing the first act and wish her luck on the second, ask if she would be willing to pick him up before she goes to dinner with the rest of the cast.

He wants to call Georgie. Blubber some apologies and ask if there’s a chance they could still be friends, because he misses her and he needs her even if she doesn’t love him anymore. 

He wants to call dadima. Whimper that he wishes he’d gone back to Bournemouth with her after all, ask if she can come gather him up and bring him home until he’s better.

Jon wants too much. Mostly he just wants the world to stop turning for a second. He wants his brain to stop tying itself into sailor’s knots and just be quiet. He wants to go home, but it’s hard to tell where “home” is, which is a problem that he wishes were solely figurative.

He’d hopped tubes where the lines crossed paths, and had somehow ended up in an unfavourable zone. It would take serious navigating and probably a cab to get back to one that would bring him back towards his flat, and at that point it might just be worth the hefty fare to be able to sit in the backseat alone. No crowd. No bright light. No chaos. Quiet, private, calm. Yes, that’s worth the money.

Right. He’ll just hail a cab and go straight back to the flat, try to get some shut-eye on the way. Order something in before all the takeaway places close. Decide if forcing himself to shower would be soothing or if it would just hurt. Problem for future Jon. 

He has four texts from Mickey.

> _hi luv! bird i know you’ve not been feeling well and maybe don’t want to_  
>  _talk to me but it’s showtime and i’m thinking about you_

> _i told everybody to let me be the only person texting you so that you don’t_  
>  _get attacked from all sides but they wanted me to make sure you know we_  
>  _dedicated the performance to you during the energy circle & we’re really_  
>  _going to knock it out of the park for you alright!!!! miss you much_

> _i wish you were here :-( katrina’s not near so fun to sing with_

> _can i call you during intermission?_

Jon doesn’t want to look at the clock and do the math in his head. His eyes burn. His throat burns. His heart hurts.

Georgie would glare at him for ignoring her. Get on his case until he responded. He texts back and asks if he’s missed his chance, and immediately, his phone begins to ring.

The call is short. Jon curls up against the cab door and tries very hard to speak above a whisper, to not let the horrible lump in his throat win out, but Mickey can hardly hear him over the backstage chaos. The fact that she’s still reaching out to him brings back the guilt and shame. When she tells him they miss him over there, it takes real effort not to hang up on her.

She offers to pick him up for the after party, and he wishes that he could say yes. He’s too exhausted to even consider purposeful social interaction, and he knows he’d just end up sulking in a chair somewhere with no energy to play nice with anyone who had gotten to soak up the experience he’d been robbed of. His body hurts too much. He can’t. He wants to, but it’s too late.

The background chatter picks up so much that Mickey half-shouts that she can’t hear him, he should text her his answer and they can make plans, she’s about to go onstage, she loves him, bye, be safe. She’s hung up before he can rasp out a proper _good luck._ Jon can’t even harp on every part of the farewell. Too rushed to mean anything. It’s just what you say.

It’s too quiet now, but the idea of putting his earphones back on is almost worse. He’s too tired to flap his hands at full capacity, but they wobble over his lap in twitches and bursts as he stays slumped against the door and tries to just relax. Just relax.

If he were home, back in Bournemouth, there’d be a routine. He’d have been able to flap and rock and whatever else, until dadima would envelop him tightly in her arms. They would make jokes about cattle in squeeze chutes when he caught his breath and the deep pressure would have calmed him enough to hold a glass of water, and then by the time he emptied it, the shaking would have stopped. He’d get to lie down and recover and it would be over.

On the tube, he’d not let himself flap or rock. He hadn’t even opened that water before he gave it away, and he still has nowhere to lie down. The closest thing to any part of his routine that he’d had was his arm pressed up against that person’s hip. The weight of their hand on his shoulder. The warm curve of their palm over the back of his head for just that one moment, that tiny bit of _too familiar_ that—

Jon clutches at his arms. No, he doesn’t get to shiver remembering that. It wasn’t intimate, or purposeful, or routine. That person is not part of his routine. It’s unfair to think of them as if they hadn’t been hurting themselves for his sake. It’s unfair to pretend that it was anything less, or anything more.

It’s unfair because he could be thinking about Mickey instead. She’s still in reach, even after _he’d_ abandoned her when he should have been sitting in the front row, should have gotten over himself and gone. Maybe that’s why it feels like it would be unfair to think of her, too.

He needs to stop thinking altogether. Enough with aching for the unattainable, as if that is suitable penance for refusing what’s in reach. Enough already.

There’s another show tomorrow. If the way he’s overtaxed his body tonight can mend itself by then, maybe he’ll try to make it. Distantly, Jon has a feeling that he won’t have the strength.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **CWs: internalized transphobia (it’s not direct, just self-doubt and repression); internalized ableism; potentially graphic description of a knee injury; depression; self-sabotage**  
> 
> 
> you should listen to these, by the way. [[heaven help my heart](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4_zUFRICGs)] [[nobody's side](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-EjSBzxBjI)] [[anthem](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUCXzWmWGRY)] [[someone else's story](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6R5VXGF3Ag)] i did not choose these songs lightly! haha i'm hurting.
> 
> another shout out has to go to kaylee @[rogueumpire](http://rogueumpire.tumblr.com/), though, for introducing me to chess as a concept because without that, this would not have hurt NEAR as much :-)
> 
> also, if anyone was curious about the arcade thing, look no further! [i finally wrote a fic about that](https://archiveofourown.org/chapters/70088934) for the [jon sims bi pride event](https://jonsimsbipride.tumblr.com/)! as part of a series of drabbles eventually that peek into jon's life before the institute. i also wrote [another one about mickey](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28985391), set after the events of this chapter!
> 
> catch me on tumblr @[gerrydelano](http://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/) as per usual! you may now throw many rocks at me.


	10. all hands on deck

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Breathing hurts at the summit. It hurts in the sea. It hurts on doorsteps under lamplight when old women call him by name from the dark maw of a shark’s den.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we have artwork! so much artwork! thank you guys so much!  
> \+ [this scene from chapter 9](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/615700435225935872/) by @boneroutes! (i actually get so choked up every time i see it.)  
> \+ [this art of leo and alma from chapter 7](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/615815118179188736/) by @tinywingull! who i can't thank enough, ever.  
> \+ [jon as hamlet](https://kayleerowena.tumblr.com/post/615876506585071616/) by @kayleerowena! (it's a surprise tool that will help us later)  
> \+ we also have [ANOTHER PLAYLIST](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXVmZ2Y1uGoAy2ZDJD7Ad_qsXIFcURA5c)! this one is on youtube, and it's by @cuttlefishkitch!
> 
> no over-explaining in the beginning notes we heal like men. LET'S GO.
> 
> **CWs in the end notes**  
> 

_all hands on deck - a call for all members of the crew to assist in a time of crisis_

───── ☆ ─────

The knock sounds wrong. Hollow, tinny. Like he’d rapped his knuckles on an aluminium sheet and not the dark, polished wood of a fancy door. He chalks it up to whorlwarp hearing. A trick his body plays. A door’s a door. Usually.

A hand’s a hand, but his can see. There had been a dim hope there. That touching his eyes to the wood might let him peer inside without it needing to come open at all, that he’d get his answers as quick as ink could blink.

Doors open as often as they shut, when they work right. This one is soundless and slow as it pulls back just enough for him to see inside with his other eyes. The real ones that can actually see but don’t focus right, or when they do, not for very long.

Scowling old women scare him. He hadn’t accounted for that. His foot slips backwards on the porch mat, a thin gasp lodging in his gum line like a speck of glass. He doesn’t fall down the steps, thankfully. The head rush recedes; he’d hardly moved an inch.

“Can I help you?”

Accusation. Disgust. He shouldn’t be here. 

Glassbreath goes down cold and cutting. His mouth is almost too dry to form words. Her eyes are dark and heavy, and he knows them.

He doesn’t manage to say it. She folds her arms. The door is held mostly-shut by her foot on the other side. “You almost certainly have the wrong house.”

“No, I—” Voice is wrong. Sticks like flypaper. He’d purposefully kept from smoking on his way here, or had he? Mouth tastes dull. Maybe he’d caved. Maybe he’d broken.

Skull feels full of oilwater when he shakes it. “No. This is the right house.”

“I can’t imagine it is,” she continues. “I don’t know you.”

The door starts to close. He looks himself in the eyes when his hand snaps out to catch it. Not to scare her. Just to stay standing. Putting pressure on the still-swollen welts hidden underneath the thick bandage has him wincing and he hates that he’s come back here in ruins.

She doesn’t look away from his face. She seems more offended than afraid. Might commend her bravery if he didn’t know very well that he must look entirely too sick and lost to be an old lady killer. Least he’d managed to shed that skin.

“Leave,” she demands, _“now._ Or I’ll have the police here in minutes.”

The numbers come out strong and even, read aloud from a page in his mind still whole and unburnt. Metronome, muscle memory, mayday. Signal to a boat not so far away now. It’s anchored here and always has been. He feels washed up on a cold shore, facedown in the tide and still drowning.

But the numbers are absolute. They’re as constant and real as any ocean.

Her eyes are dark and heavy and widen before they narrow down. Scowling old women still scare him, but he’s not afraid of judgment. Her voice is an expanse of grey stone, a jetty in defense of its harbour.

“How did you get that number?”

“You gave it to me.”

“...No, I would remember—”

“You do remember,” he insists. “You just don’t recognize me. And that’s fair. That’s fair, I’m different. I know, and I’m doing this all wrong. But you’re letting me, so I’ll get there.”

He’s written out this script before, but it didn’t stick in his head. Not like the numbers, or her heavydark eyes. Not like her grandson and all the fear and love in finger-shaped bruises. So much is hazy and so many of his words blur together and the only thing he’d _taken_ today was a shot in the dark.

But she’s letting him do this wrong. So he’ll get there.

“I was just a kid. Stupid… stupid kid, and you were good to me. _I_ remember. And I remembered your number even after I burnt it. I’d have remembered your name if you ever told me, but I don’t think you wrote it down. Or I’d have remembered.”

Breathing hurts at the summit. He doesn’t recall getting so high up out of the tide. How much more does she need? What is he doing here, really? Begging to be remembered? As what? As who?

He rubs his hand over his mouth to stop his rambling. A ring splint drags against a stud under his lip. Cold. He’s cold, it’s all cold, and it’s early springtime. It’s mid-afternoon. The wind is gentle and warm and he’s cold, and huffing a breath into the fabric of the gauze wrap over his palm does little to change that for the better. He thought he’d be shaking, but it doesn’t feel like he is.

A glass-sharp gasp shakes his eyes into focus. Hers are dark and heavy and shining in the shade of the doorway. She speaks past age-spotted fingers.

“...Gerry?”

Breathing hurts at the summit. It hurts in the sea. It hurts on doorsteps under lamplight when old women call him by name from the dark maw of a shark’s den.

No lamplight on an early spring mid-afternoon. It’s a daylight name she’d called him. The way that breathing hurts now has nothing to do with Gerry’s fitful, pinholed heart.

The door is wide open, unshadowed and inviting. Dadi has stepped out to meet him, her hand fallen away from her mouth but her eyes still dark and heavy and searching, now, with a frantic energy amassed all at once. Gerry drops his hand from his face, but it’s too late. She’s seen what he’s done to it, and so now it must matter. She scans over him as if in search of more open wounds and her gaze stops at the column of his throat where Gerry knows there to be an angry red mark, the irritated love bite of something barbed and buzzing. She holds herself back from reaching, hand over fist held tightly under her chin.

It’s strange to be taller, even if it’s only by an inch or so. In his memory, he’s looking up at her from the floor. She was a tower. Had to kneel to meet his eyes. Had to bend. She’d bent for him, once.

Gerry swallows lead. His mouth drags itself up by the corners despite his vision, full to the gunwales with burning. He doesn’t know if he’d smiled at her before.

“Sorry I never called.”

She breaks, then, and reaches. She grabs his sleeve and hales herself to him, throws an arm over his shoulder with a sharp outbreath that Gerry wants very desperately to be fond in its disgruntlement. The weight of contact is sore, but she’s no way of knowing the depth of his ache. How it’s woven itself into the very cords of his muscles like a friendship bracelet, gnaws on his bones like a sick dog. She can’t see the loveless stingerbites scattered over the star map they’ve made of his chest. 

She’d bent for him, once. He can bend for her, despite all of that.

He bends for himself, too. Gerry loops his arms around her back, drops his face into her neck. She clings onto him and he needs this. He was so sure he hadn’t been shaking. It feels violent now against the contrast of her stillness. His legs threaten to give out and he fights it. The urge to cry harder is there, but that, he doesn’t have to fight as much. Hadn’t drank enough water on the way here. He wouldn’t even have the strength.

Her hands cup both of his cheeks when she pulls back, thumb glancing a plaster placed diagonally across the hollow on his left. She shakes her head, disbelief spilling out of her mouth in exhales to take the place of words she can’t seem to find yet. So, she hasn’t changed much. He remembers her speechlessness as much as she probably remembers his. There’s a grey patch of wetness on her collar.

“...You _burned_ the number?”

The porch undulates under his feet. He laughs.

“Usually the first thing I do with stuff I shouldn’t have.”

The answer doesn’t seem to satisfy her, if the furrow of her brow is any sign. She drops her hands to get a grip on his arms, her mouth twisting as she studies him again.

Maybe this had been a mistake after all. He may have spent all this time aching for someone to notice, but he still wants it to come without needing to explain.

“Well, we’re not going to talk about it standing around out here.” She steps back into the doorway, tugging on his sleeve. “Come on, then. In. Quickly.”

Gerry doesn’t have it in him for modesty. He follows her inside as easily as his legs will let him, which isn’t saying much. His knees had locked while he stood out there on the porch, and something had gone wrong in them when he’d given up balance for an embrace. All of it in conjunction just leaves him wobbling. It kills him to know that this is what he’s like even when he’s spent the morning clean. If he buckles, he’ll get a brace out of his bag.

The living room is different. Like everything’s smaller. Some real Alice in Wonderland shit, but nothing’s twisting growing shrinking changing right in front of him. Sober. Just older.

New couch. Brown leather, no doilies. Gerry sinks back into the cushions when he sits down. The relief is immediate and immense. He has to shut his eyes to absorb it. Let the air settle around him. Stop whistling in his ears.

Dadi sits down beside him. No need for kneeling now. The time for caution is seventeen years stale. He’s not a porcelain child, or a liability. At least, not the way he was.

“I wish you’d called,” she tells him. “If you _remembered_ the number so well, why didn’t you use it? Even just to tell me you were planning to come here yourself now?”

Gerry doesn’t have a good answer for that. He shrugs, reaching back up to rub at his eyes. The side of his finger comes away smudged with old eyeliner. He wipes the ring splint off on the side of his trousers.

“Honestly? I sort of forgot that’s what they’re for.”

Dadi crosses her arms. “You’ll have to do a lot better than that.”

Smile, wince. All the same. “Right. Um… It, uh. I think at some point, it stopped being a telephone number to me, that I could _call._ Turned into a… code, more like. Magic password I’d need, t-to… find…” Gerry waves a hand. It drops back onto his leg and he jolts, like waking sharply from a dozing half-dream. 

Where was he? Right.

“The radio. Some commercial came on, think for… a resort, or the amusement park? Contest for free passes. _01202_ , and then the rest was only… only a number or two off, and it came back to me, I remembered. All of a sudden. But it wasn’t a phone number. More a map. That’s why I had to burn it, or else—”

A hand comes down around his wrist and he flinches. The pattern on the carpet twists like a kaleidoscope. Too late, he catches the mantra of _Gerry, Gerry, Gerry_ she must have been trying to get his attention with for… how long? How long had… 

Breathing is so hard. Windpipe cap flaps open and shut as he tries to get better at it, at least long enough that he can remember what he’d been trying to say. To get his eyes to stick somewhere useful and constant. He’d try to look at her face, but turning his head feels like some monumental endeavour and he isn’t sure his neck will support the movement without pain. The line between imagined ache and real is so blurred sometimes that it feels safer to stay still when there’s no one who needs him to move.

Instead, he watches her hand smooth over the back of his. Her fingertips skim the splints around his knuckles, her thumb sweeping across the edge of the bandage where a few faintly raised welts still reside in the tender space between his fingers. Gerry winces. She shouldn’t touch them; he wants to warn her that the marks are Corrupted, that it isn’t safe, but the threshold between bandage and reddened skin is never crossed. 

“My G-d,” she breathes. “What’s _happened_ to you?”

“Um.” The nonword is a quavering, honeylogged clump of wax. “Bees?”

He lets out a quick, manic breath, two parts helpless laughter and one part wildered whine. It could be so funny if it weren’t the truth. If even after he had plucked out the barbs and flushed the stings clean with water and drugstore iodine, the welts weren’t still smouldering with waning venom. If they were just regular fucking bees. If it was the _only_ thing that’s happened to him, and not just the most recent.

The answer was unnecessary anyway. She couldn’t have really been expecting anything useful; it had been the truth, but she wouldn’t understand that. She wouldn’t understand how he _knew_ the bees were wrong before he even traced them back to their source. She wouldn’t understand why he intervened, or what it meant for him to have been so out of options that he’d had no choice but to stick his hand into the black swarm in order to set the heart of it on fire.

Even if he wanted to explain that he’d done it to save an innocent girl, even if it would grant either of them peace of mind, Gerry’s lungs are whipping flags in the wind tunnel of his chest. The current seeps up into his brain and all his thoughts go cold and confusing. His fingers clutch at his shirt, desperate to knuckle his heart into beating right. Dadi has to lean into his space to get his attention again.

“Gerry, take a moment. Look at me.”

He looks at her. It takes a moment, but he does it. Dadi scoots to the edge of the couch.

“Will you let me get you a glass of water?”

The wind tunnel deafens itself and he remembers something. He remembers being so scared he’d scared her, too. Holding her shaking grandson on the green couch while he cried. Water. She’d gotten them both water, and it had helped. He hasn’t drank enough water today. He doesn’t have it in him for modesty.

She’s back and pressing the glass into his hand before he can recall ever nodding his agreement, but that’s fine. Won’t waste his energy trying to put that puzzle together when he needs to focus on hand-to-mouth coordination. The glass empties itself in mere moments.

Dadi’s hand is settled tentatively on his back. Doesn’t rub circles or drum the drink down his throat with impatient pats. Already, things are clearer. Just a bit. She reaches for the glass and it slips from his fingers into her grasp like it, too, had become water somehow. 

Gerry slouches forward over his knees. Dadi’s hand moves to his shoulder. She doesn’t displace his hair from where it’s spilt over to hide his face.

“When is the last time you slept?” she asks. _“Really_ slept.”

Gerry sniffs, coughs into his fist. His hesitation is answer enough. Better for it; he’s actually not sure.

The touch on his shoulder becomes a firm grip. Gerry allows himself to be pushed upright and backwards, for the life of him, still confused about why he’s breathing like he’s just run a marathon. Best he just shut his eyes again and let it settle.

“You’re in no state to be interrogated,” dadi says, brisk. “I don’t need to know your secrets any more than you need rest.”

Gerry peers over at her. “I don’t… I didn’t come here just to impose on you.”

Dadi scoffs. “And I didn’t let you in just to let you go so easily. Not again, Gerry. Not this time.”

Her tone leaves no room for argument. Gerry doesn’t have the energy to put up a fight, even in his own head. He’ll kick himself for this later, when he’s more himself. When he’s not delirious on the couch after dragging himself backwards through time for no reason other than…

When he’s able to really remember why he’s here. When he can tell her something that makes sense.

He’s not so out of his mind that he can’t unzip his boots before painstakingly arranging himself on the couch at dadi’s insistence. The black space behind his eyelids twists and churns when he rests his head down, but then it stops and it’s easier, finally, to let out a long breath that doesn’t hurt as much. He can feel himself trembling still in the way that he knows he tends to when he’s just _exhausted,_ that weird tremor in his legs that feels like rocking he can’t control.

A quilt comes down over him and Gerry opens his eyes again, straining to watch through the blur as dadi pats his knee before disappearing out of his periphery. The roar and crash of more tiny, loud memories obscures whatever words she speaks from across the room. His blood is doing something weird. Remembering that at least some of it belongs in the upper half of his body, too, and rolling over itself like lava to get there.

When he opens his eyes again, it’s because his chest feels about to cave in. For a second, he panics; for a second, he thinks it’s one of those dreams that makes you think you’ve woken up only to kill you a second time just when you start to believe you might be safe, before you finally come to gasping and sweating and crying for your mother. Dreams of dreadstones and sadistic beasts that would crush a rib cage into sand dollar bits just to roll around in the dust in gleeful, gory celebration.

His gasp now is more of a wheeze. There really _is_ something on his chest, and it’s staring at him with big, yellow eyes and his immediate thought is _teeth._ All traces of sleep are ripped from his skull and he jerks back as much as he can while pinned so thoroughly by— by—

A cat. A colossal, glaring cat with so much peach-coloured fluff to it that he can hardly tell where the damn thing ends, it’s so close to his face. The enormous weight of it spans his entire torso, sinking all the way down to his stomach. The hard press of paw-to-evil-bee-sting through the quilt is like sticking a finger in a bullet wound, but it’s not like a cat could know that.

Well. One way to be woken up, he supposes.

Catching his breath after the scare takes actual effort, because the cat seems entirely unaffected by his panicked squirming and shows no interest in moving. It’s comfortable where it is, and Gerry realizes very quickly that he’s just going to have to be alright with that. Slowly, he reaches up a hand to offer it for inspection. Once his fingers are nudged in approval, he threads them through the long fur at its side. The spike of adrenaline fades back into drowsiness as the sound of thunderous purring fills his head and his chest with peaceful vibrations.

“And so the Lioness of Brittany claims another victim.”

The cat turns its head when Gerry does as dadi comes to stand in front of the couch, her arms crossed. His eyes are hazy enough to miss the finer details in her expression, but he’s pretty sure she’s smiling.

“She…” A wince and an _ow_ before he manually moves a paw off of a sore spot. The cat doesn’t protest. “She crush people often?”

Definitely smiling. “Only when they’re under her favourite blanket. Is she hurting you?”

Gerry’s attempt at a laugh is a wheeze, too, but he doesn’t move his hands from where he’s buried them again. “I’ll survive.” Wait a second. “...Lioness of Brittany?”

Dadi strokes a hand along the cat’s head before drifting over to an armchair. “After the pirate, Jeanne de Clisson.”

Gerry smiles at the cat, rubs his thumbs along her fine cheekbones and watches as her eyes wink shut. “Strong name for a cat.”

“Strong cat.”

True enough. It really is a little hard to laugh with the Lioness of Brittany so firmly nested over his sternum, but Gerry does his best. It’s nice that he can hear the smile in dadi’s voice still, even when she’s out of eyeshot. It’s new, and not just because it’s like they’re meeting again for the first time.

He’s not ready to talk about that yet. The Lioness of Brittany is much more intriguing.

“Any…” He licks his lips, clears his throat. Very dry. “Any reason you chose a pirate?”

“I’ve a long love for maritime history,” she explains. “Not one I get to talk about much, but an interest nonetheless. The ocean is a comfort to me, and the fun is in the wild things.”

Gerry pauses. Something about that sounds off. He’d come here the first time for the ocean himself. Had spent a day there convinced that it was somehow rare for his companion to see the water, too, despite it all but being in his backyard. If dadi loves the ocean, why didn’t her grandson know that?

Gerry’s not ready to ask. He’s still a lot more interested in the idea that dadi has a penchant for _anything_ wild.

“Lioness of Brittany was the one who hated the French king, right?” he asks. “Painted all her ships black?”

“With blood red sails,” dadi adds. “The Black Fleet. She stalked the English Channel going after French nobles out of vengeance for her husband’s execution. Only left survivors so they could carry back messages to the King that she’d struck again. No one knew whether to call her a heroine or a monster, but I think that distinction hinges on your attitude towards the French.”

Far be it for Gerry to pass up laughing at a black joke. There’s something deeply satisfying about the fact that this woman had named her gigantic cat after a brutal pirate queen who decked out her fleet in black and red before running around picking off French nobles. Jeanne de Clisson was almost definitely an agent of the Slaughter, but that didn’t mean the way dadi tells her story isn’t sort of hilarious.

Might be why it’s hilarious, actually. Gerry doesn’t know. He’s more focused on just how much this tells him about the honest parts of dadi’s mind that she had kept so tightly locked away when he was too young to be trusted with it, too temporary to have spent time earning it.

The Lioness is still purring like her life depends on it, her chin rested on her paws where she’s crossed them in front of her. “She seems more cuddly than her namesake.”

“Oh, entirely. But it’s just so fun to say.”

Her humour aches. Gerry is content with it. Feels nice to smile so much, even with a tired face. 

Dadi shifts forward in her chair. “You slept for a good while. Are you hungry yet?”

Oh, right. He’d slept. Come to think of it, he can’t actually remember if he’d _fallen asleep_ or if he’d just passed out, or how long it took for whichever it was to happen. Lately, the line between them hardly exists. He supposes it doesn’t matter. He does feel a little better, though a full night would be ideal. The nap should get him through until he finds a suitable hotel, once dadi gets tired of him.

She’d asked a question. Shit, she’d asked about food. Gerry rubs at his nose, clears his throat with another wheeze under the weight of the Lioness.

“Uh— I mean, yes, but you don’t have to. I’ve bothered you long enough.”

“Are you going to do this the entire time?” she sighs. “Because I would much rather save us both the trouble and establish right now that I’m not going to indulge it for a second. You’re not going to downplay the trouble you’re in just so I’ll let you run right back into it without at _least_ a proper meal in you. Am I being unclear?”

Gerry blinks at her. “...Not at all. I just don’t understand why. I show up out of the blue, a complete wreck, and you’re just _alright_ with—?”

Dadi interrupts him with a quick, humourless laugh. “Of course I’m not _alright_ with it, I—” 

She sighs again. Straightens, stiffens. When she looks at him, her eyes are dark and heavy and alight, glass marbles trapped around unyielding flame. Gerry feels an instinct to wither under the stare, but a lack of fear and resentment grants him the strength to look back.

“I failed you once,” she says. “There are _very_ few things that have haunted me more persistently than the weekend you spent here.”

An apology starts to form, but dadi’s raised hand halts its utterance just as much as the dryness of his mouth. She shakes her head.

“And that’s not your fault.” She lowers her hand. “I’ve had a long time to reason with my guilt. What I could never come to grips with was the worry. I swear, my mind must have come up with just about every terrible possible explanation for why that phone never rang.”

Not _every_ possible explanation, most likely. Gerry won’t correct her. His heart is in his throat, writhing like a bird in a barbed wire fence.

“I failed you,” she repeats. “And just because it didn’t just outright _kill_ you doesn’t mean I intend to do it again. You’re a grown man. You’re capable, now, of working _with_ me to help you out of whatever mess it is you’re in. This is all hands on deck.”

“There’s no way out,” he blurts, dumbly. “Not completely, it’s— it’s complicated. I burned your number to keep from dragging you into it.”

Dadi doesn’t so much as twitch. “This isn’t about me. It’s not even about atonement. It’s about how you are in such a circumstance that you came _here_ of all places in the middle of it. It tells me, Gerry, that you have very few other options, if any at all. What kind of _monster_ would turn you out on the street knowing that?”

Gerry swallows and it hurts. His chest feels more compressed than before. He knows he needs to get this cat off of him eventually, but he’s frozen.

Dadi folds her hands. She can’t seem to get comfortable, but she’s doing her best not to show it. Gerry recognizes it better now than he ever could have as a child.

“I’m not a saint,” she says clearly. “I’m not overextending myself. I’m not trying to pay back a debt, or fill a void, or whatever nonsense you’re probably trying to convince yourself must be my intention just because you’re reluctant to accept my help. I’m telling you to skip that part because the only time you’ll be wasting is yours and, from here, it doesn’t look like you can afford it.

“We can talk like adults now and I can do more for you than phone the police. All I ask is that you trust me again. If you’re so concerned with how I feel, can you just do that for me?”

She must have rehearsed that speech while he was asleep. Her conviction is calm and all the more imposing for it, and Gerry has never been adept at picking fights with women like her.

No. No, he doesn’t know any women like her. She’s not like any woman he knows.

She’s waiting for him to respond. His mouth is still dry, and it takes a few tries to summon his voice back.

“Okay,” he rasps. “I can’t breathe.” 

The Lioness makes a low noise of protest at being hoisted up by the underarms when dadi crosses over to remove her from Gerry’s chest. She glowers at him with so much darkness that he has to laugh again as he slowly sits himself up. His ribs don’t thank him for the strain, but they’ll have to get over it.

If he’s going to let himself be here, let dadi take the reins, let the Lioness trample all over him— If he’s going to let himself accept this, he’s going to let himself laugh, too. As much as he wants. As much as he can.

Dadi had started cooking while he was asleep. She crosses back into the kitchen to finish it, raising her voice to chat across rooms, while Gerry prepares himself for the ordeal of standing back up. If he takes it slow, he should at least be able to make it to the tall chair at the table before the dizzy kicks in. It’s not that far away. He can do it.

If she notices how hard it is for him, she doesn’t say anything. Instead, she says something about how she thought he could use some protein and greens, and Gerry doesn’t fully register exactly what she’s prepared until he’s halfway through shoveling the first forkful into his mouth. The wave of relief he’s struck with now is almost more powerful than that of sitting down on that couch for the first time. All that even matters is that it’s hot, it’s substantial, and it immediately eliminates the phantom taste of smoke from his mouth. He makes his attempt at small talk while they both eat, but dadi seems to understand where his focus needs to be.

He still doesn’t quite manage to clear his plate before he has to prop his head onto his hand, forcing a deep breath in and out of his lungs to wake himself up from the inside. He squints over at dadi when she just about laughs, and hums to ask her what’s so funny.

Dadi shakes her head, one corner of her mouth tweaked. “History really does have a way of repeating itself.”

“How do you mean?”

“You did that the last time you were here.” She gestures to him with her fork. “All but fell asleep at the table.”

Gerry feels obligated now to sit up straight again. “I did?”

“Every time,” she agrees. “I honestly thought it was because your mother starved you at home, and you weren’t used to eating well. By now, I’m inclined to think it’s just an idiosyncrasy.”

Gerry thinks about how little he eats sometimes nowadays, and decides it’s best not to confirm or deny either of dadi’s assumptions. It doesn’t seem to make a difference. She sets down her fork in favour of sipping her dandelion and burdock before she folds her hands on the table.

“Are you still living with her?”

It feels like the fork goes cold in his grip. Gerry clears his throat, rubs his nose again. The hoop hanging from his septum clacks against his splints. He shouldn’t have slept with them on. If he doesn’t take them off now, he might not remember to by nightfall. 

So his answer to dadi’s question is, at first, the soft sound of silver bands settling in a pile on the granite. When they’re all off, he flexes his hands.

“If you can call it living.”

The quiet before her response is shattered then by the frankly horrendous popping of all his knuckles. It leaves him itching to do the rest of him — wrists, shoulders, spine — but it would probably be rude to become a twisting roll of bubble wrap right at her table without precedence.

Dadi heaves a great sigh. “Well, for the time being, you’ll just have to stay here. Tomorrow we’re going to start fresh, and work together to figure out another option for you.”

Gerry can’t help staring at her. He doesn’t know what his face is doing, but whatever it is, dadi looks extraordinarily unimpressed.

“I… Thank you,” he tries, “but that sounds a lot like freeloading off of you, and you don’t even know me.”

Dadi speaks against the rim of her glass, her posture prim and unflinching. “I thought we had just finished having this conversation.”

“Well, yeah, but—”

“Gerry,” she warns, and there is nothing cutting about her voice or her dark, heavy eyes or the way it feels to hear it. “Look me in the eye and tell me you’re in any state to be traveling.”

He can’t. He doesn’t.

“And now look me in the eye and tell me you want to go back to that place.”

He doesn’t. He can’t.

“Perhaps it’s easier said than done,” dadi shrugs as she picks up her fork again. “But we won’t know until we give it a shot. For now, you’ll stay in Jon’s old room.”

The sound of the name slips through Gerry’s head like a stream of ice-cold water. 

Jon. Jon, the boy in the park with the bad luck and the big glasses. Jon, the boy with the first aid kit and the dinosaur encyclopedias and the dangerous questions. Jon, the first person to hold onto him like he was a life preserver in a dark, frightening sea. The first friend Gerry had ever made and lost. The first person he’d ever saved. 

That’s his name. Jon.

Gerry doesn’t think he’d actually forgotten his name. Hearing it said aloud by someone else is just a jarring reminder of how he hadn’t happened upon dadi’s help by ordinary circumstances. Jon has been existing somewhere out there the same way dadi has been all this time, and apparently, they’ve been existing in different places.

“Where, uh…” Gerry remembers that he can take a drink, too, to soothe his throat when his voice catches in its dryness. “Where is Jon these days?”

Dadi’s eyes flicker away. “London. Sharing a flat with some friends.”

Relief pours itself over Gerry’s ribs, like water on a molten sword. That’s one less thing to worry about, if Jon has _people_ in his life. “What’s wrong?”

She pokes at her food for a moment, choosing her words. “Nothing’s wrong. It was just nice to have him here.” The tines of her fork tap on the plate. “You only just missed him, actually.”

“…Just?” Gerry repeats. Air twists in his lungs. “When did he leave?”

“He moved back in with me in October,” she explains. “Just to get back on his feet after some things went south for him . He decided to get back on the horse in February, so… six weeks ago? Coming up on seven, maybe.”

Oh.

There are so many questions at the tip of Gerry’s tongue, and now is not the time to ask them. He does wonder if this is the reason for her fierceness. Regret rolls off of her in waves.

And so he fights off flashes of the fictional futures he’d created for that boy whenever he sprung to mind and wouldn’t leave until Gerry came up with an ending for him. An ending not choked with monsters and awful knowledge and an early death. Usually, he ended up an archaeologist. Always, he ended up happy. Untouched. Untortured. Unseen.

The answer to the most important question that he could have asked has already been answered: Jon is still alive. That’ll be enough to get Gerry through the night.

Given that he’s apparently going to be here for a while yet, he’ll have time to ask later.

“Oh, right,” Gerry muses aloud. “Since we’re going to be talking about things like grown-ups and all, I get the feeling that calling you ‘dadi’ might be sort of weird.”

Her mouth pinches a bit, but she scoffs out a breath to smooth it away.

“Well, we’re meeting again as friends,” she says, “so ‘Miriam’ will do just fine.”

Gerry scoffs, too. He’d expected something a bit more formal out of her, but he supposes it makes sense. She always had done her best to put herself on his level.

It’s all a ruse, of course, but it’s sort of nice to think that they could just be unlikely friends instead of what he knows they really are. He could be the nice neighbour who helps her bring her groceries into the house when he sees her struggling to close the trunk of her car, and not the desperate junkie who bulldozed into her home to bring some of her worst nightmares back up to the surface of their acquaintance. It’d be nice to be the nice neighbour instead.

“Alright,” Gerry agrees. “Miriam, then.”

She insists he clear his plate before sending him upstairs, and she’s patient when it takes him a little longer than he’d like. He offers to do the dishes for her, makes some flat joke about earning his keep, and she rejects him with a large spoon pointed towards the living room. He’ll ruin his bandages that way, and he shouldn’t stand around. Et cetera, et cetera. 

He sits at the table while she does it anyway, calculating how he could get away with doing that chore tomorrow. Maybe he could drag one of these chairs over to the sink. They’re tall enough.

When they pass by the couch, the Lioness of Brittany is curled up on top of the quilt. Miriam advises him, helpfully, that the cat will go wherever the blanket goes. It’s sort of adorable to hear her footsteps padding along behind him after he wrestles the thing out from underneath her to ball it up in his arms, lugging it along with his rucksack towards the staircase.

Stairs are the hardest part. He won’t tell Miriam that; she parts ways with him at the bottom to go into her study instead, trusting that he can find Jon’s room on his own. He doesn’t have the energy to examine the magnitude of that trust. What little energy he does have is spent wholly on trying to haul himself up the stairs without stumbling backwards, or straight out swooning from the exertion. It’s pathetic, honestly, but he knows it’s the funky blood syndrome and the headache, _oh,_ the headache.

He’d almost forgotten the headache. By the time his heart is really misbehaving in his chest after he reaches the top of the steps, Gerry can’t grasp how he’d managed to forget the headache. It’s so loud. It’s been scraping its fangs along the walls of his skull for days now, grinding tally marks into the bone.

He’ll sleep it off.

There’s no way to describe how bizarre it feels to flick on the light switch in this room, and so he doesn’t try. Miriam had told him to ignore the few boxes she’d pushed up against the far wall, and assured him that the bed was clear and made, so he wouldn’t have to do any rearranging before settling down. Sad part is knowing that it isn’t because she’d been expecting company. It’s just that no one lives here anymore.

Gerry is frankly too tired to explore the room right away. Once he locates where the bed even is (it used to be against a different wall, didn’t it?) he drops his rucksack and boots to the floor with a series of _thunks_ and smacks the light switch back off to cross the room blind. Floor is clear enough to walk a straight line. Not all darkness is Darkness. Some is just better for building migraines. For the shakes, and the sick, and what he knows is coming given how he hasn’t had a chance to reach into his bag for the bottle of painkillers he’d brought with him.

He could get it now. For the headache. For the burnstings. Just to get to sleep. Just for the shaking and the sick and the _what’s to come_ to stop before it happens. He could, but the dread he feels at the prospect of disappointing Miriam manages to outweigh the outcry of his nerves as they yearn and yowl for something numbing to chew on.

Instead of that, he rolls face-first onto the bed the minute he’s close enough to let himself fall. Once he’s down, there is no more battle. At least not one he can begin to fight. The quilt is trapped underneath him like a boulder, but it takes a long moment to convince himself that it’s even worth it to move. For the moment, he’ll take sore ribs for the headspin of disturbing any brief stasis, of rocking the surface of how his blood has decided to pool inside him.

The weight of the Lioness leaping up onto the mattress by his legs doesn’t rattle him as much as her first wake up call had. He rolls over to pull the quilt out from under him, strains to toss it over himself enough that it actually feels like he’s about to try and sleep despite not having the will to even change out of his day clothes. The cat lurks and explores at her leisure and Gerry stays still until she lowers herself down right in front of him, tipping herself over to wedge up against his chest where the quilt falls over him. Gerry unearths his arm from the blanket and the Lioness lets him curl it over her side.

The sheer volume of her purring pierces the cottonthrob of his headache. He can feel the vibration of it again between her spine and his sternum. The line between _passing out_ and _falling asleep_ hardly exists to him anymore, but with a steady backbeat to his tremors and something alive in his arms, it’s a bit easier to tell the difference.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **CWs: insects/stings; drug addiction; medical talk; POTS attack; panic attack; severe dissociation**
> 
> also, A TIMELINE, if anyone needs:  
> \+ chapter 7 was earlier 2008; jon in uni  
> \+ chapter 8 was winter 2008; after mary's death  
> \+ chapter 9 was summer 2010; thereabouts!  
> \+ it's currently early spring in 2011; gerry has NOT been desolation burned yet
> 
> has anybody else missed miriam? here's [this nifty meta i wrote on her the other day!](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/616127436034375680/) the only old lady who matters. of COURSE she owns a norwegian forest cat named after a pirate queen.
> 
> catch me on tumblr @[gerrydelano](http://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/) as usual!


	11. stem the tide

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “We’re both out of our depth,” Miriam pipes up. “I don’t want to make a mistake, or for you to continue hurting yourself. Your health is a top priority.”
> 
> Dammit. Just when he’d managed to stop laughing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> alternatively: gerry and miriam play a really intense game of 20 questions.
> 
> also, have this art of [gerry with the lioness of brittany!](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/617067158145548288/) FUCK! thank you @boneroutes!
> 
>  **CWs in the end notes** , and some acknowledgments! there is also some handwriting in this chapter (after "bottom of the list."), so if you can't read the image, i'll transcribe it below.

_stem the tide - to try to prevent a situation from becoming worse than it already is_

───── ☆ ─────

At breakfast, Miriam pulls out a piece of paper. Gerry is focused on his porridge, dappled with almonds and cinnamon and sweet bits of peach. Ordinarily, the texture would upset his mouth, but at the moment, he’s reasonably convinced that this is the most satisfying thing he’s ever eaten. It’s almost a shame to keep swapping out the taste of it for crisp bursts of orange juice, but he’s always thirsty. Sacrifices.

Miriam pushes her dish aside to make room in front of her and smooths the paper down, setting a pen down beside it. She clears her throat for his attention. Gerry glances over to see a column of inked-in bubbles stretching down the left-hand margin.

“I make lists,” Miriam explains. “And while you’re here, you’ll be making lists, too.”

Gerry stares at her over the rim of his orange juice. He manages to take a good few gulps before he dares to ask, “What for?”

“To get your priorities in order. Do forgive me if I’m wrong, but you seem _more_ than a little disorganized. It’s a habit that would benefit you.”

Gerry scoffs. She’s not wrong. “So, what’s on that one?”

_“My_ priorities. I put this together last night. Actually, a few. This is the finalized version.”

“Sounds like a lot of work.”

“It is,” she agrees. “But a favourable outcome is worth the effort.”

Gerry finishes his orange juice and pushes the glass away. He’d been sure to save at least one peach bit and one almond per presumed portion of the last of his porridge. It’s inexplicably refreshing to know that it’ll be the final flavour left in his mouth by the time they get up from the table.

“Most of these points are questions,” Miriam continues, a stubborn bell buoy in the waves of his focus. “Most of them are going to be uncomfortable. I’ll still need you to be honest with me in answering as many as you can, though, so that we can progress to the next step.”

“Which—” Okay, idiot. _Swallow_ the porridge first. “Sorry. Which is?” 

“Immediate action.” 

Calm, resolute. Almost proud in her certainty. Gerry looks across the table at Miriam and, for a moment, sees the tower he remembers.

For the first time, he finds himself examining her features. She’s not so sharp as she is in his memories. He can’t decide if the curve of her mouth is gentler now or just more tired. Her cheekbones are still prominent, but her hair is loose and skims her shoulders. He remembers it twisted into a clip at the back of her head, the colour of a pinolith stone. It’s all silvers now.

The word “queenly” comes to mind. Gerry can’t summon the will to find it all that uncomfortable. Some women do age gracefully.

She clears her throat again. Right. Questions.

“So, what’s number one?” he asks. He has to make some kind of effort. 

Miriam glances down at the paper one last time before she looks up at his face. It looks more like she’s staring at his chin than into his eyes. “What is it you’re using?”

Gerry’s spoon goes still against the inside of his bowl before he can scoop up that last bit of porridge. He doesn’t have a pleading look to give her.

“Starting with a bang,” he huffs.

“I can put up with you thinking I’m an insufferable nag. Are you going to tell me?”

Gerry wonders where his reluctance has gone. It only takes a second to realize and accept that he doesn’t have the energy, or the desire, to deflect.

He remembers her calling him brave, and promising him a break from it if he could answer her questions. Gerry can’t say any part of this makes him feel brave in the slightest, but maybe she’ll still have mercy if he cooperates.

“Painkillers.” The admission is no more difficult than an exhale. Which is to say; painful, but still something he can do. What goes up must come down. What goes in must come out.

Miriam nods her head. “I’m guessing the strong stuff. Opiates?”

A thunderclap of shame. “...Yeah. Do I need to get my bag and show—?”

“No, I believe you. I just want to be sure what sort of withdrawals you’ll be dealing with. How long they’ll last, how to help you through them. Did you take any last night?”

“No. Haven’t since the night before I came out here. I wanted… I didn’t want to be—” Gerry shrinks. “I wanted to be sober when I saw you again.”

Miriam’s hands fidget. She adjusts which one is layered over the other. Gerry studies the ring on her finger for a moment, and for the first time spots the little insect captured in the amber bead, sprawled and frozen in time.

“Thank you,” she says after a silence. The twitch of her brow almost looks like distaste for the word choice, but Gerry knows what she was trying to say. “You do look off colour, though. How bad is it?”

Taking inventory of it takes a moment. Gerry can’t always tell the difference between a headache that comes from too long without a dose, or the kind that simply never leaves. The muscle ache is omnipresent. He could never put a blue ribbon on his sense of balance. All of it is bad, and it is always with him.

But he can feel the itch under his skin and he knows what it would take to scratch it. He knows the way that his stomach is starting to regret tending to the hunger that follows a full night’s sleep; a full night with no intermission, and so a morning of painful craving.

“I’ve had worse. But it’s gonna get worse. You’re— You don’t want to deal with that any more than I want you to see it.”

“I don’t care,” Miriam says quickly. “You’ll get no judgment from me for being sick.”

Gerry doesn’t like the way the word sounds. Applied to him, it feels as foreign as it does inherent. Miriam doesn’t give him long to reflect on it.

“Have you ever tried to come off of them before?”

Gerry tongues the flat back of the stud in his lip. “Not for long, no.”

Miriam hums. “I think you could stand to consider trying again.”

Trepidation wraps itself around the tracts and tubes in his throat like a razor wire garrote, pulled tight enough to slice before it strangles. Preemptive regret forms in his mouth like a handful of pills, congealed together in a mound by sticky, plastic capsules. A prophet’s shock of yearning so physical that he _feels_ it goes down slowly when he tries to swallow, pressing out against the sharp cut of his doubt. If it were real, it would be bleeding.

Miriam continues reading off of her list.

“Do you drink at all?”

A clipped sound jumps out past the stranglechoke. To call it a laugh would be laughable. “Only when I need to be unconscious.”

She makes a face. He doesn’t blame her. He’d made the same one when he realized from the floor that he couldn’t tolerate alcohol worth a damn. Stupid blood absorption whatever. Probably for the best. 

Miriam clicks her pen and draws a swift line. “Right. Just the drugs, then. I’m assuming you got them from a doctor first. When was the last time you actually _saw_ a doctor?”

Gerry lifts up his right hand. “Bees.”

“So, a few days ago? Give or take?”

He looks down at his fingers, thinks back. “No, longer. Uh… Week or so? Took me a while to get up the nerve to go in the first place, post-bee.”

Miriam’s eyes go big. “And they still look like _that?_ Are you allergic?”

Oh, right. Oops. “Not that I know of? Never actually been stung by a normal bee. They were probably wasps, come to think of it.”

Regular wasps don’t leave barbs, but regular bees can’t sting more than once. The distinction can’t possibly matter when these had managed to do both. Could almost pass for a joke if he just leaves it at ‘bees.’

Her almost-laugh is disbelieving. “What on earth did you _do,_ crack open a whole nest like a— a _piñata_ and _roll around_ in it?”

For a moment, Gerry sincerely contemplates whether going along with that story would be any better than the truth of it. Is it even all that different, actually?

“I mean, I didn’t roll around in it,” he clarifies. “But the piñata thing isn’t too far off.”

Gerry doesn’t need to wax poetic about skulls that collapse in on themselves and deflate like rotting soufflés. The things that live inside them when they appoint themselves as someone’s new mind. Miriam can live without a description of how it felt for the parietal bone to yield under his knuckles as easily as masticated wood, so soaked through with syrupsick that it had putrefied.

The last bite of his porridge no longer looks appetizing.

Miriam shifts. Gerry doesn’t even want to know what she’s assuming about his state of mind. He sniffs, pushes his bowl away.

“Next question?”

“Right,” Miriam recovers. “Have you seen a doctor for any other reason recently? Wasps barred.”

He shrugs. “Not sure what for.”

Sharp breath. Another line drawn. “Alright, who’s your physical therapist? Can you access that care if you’re not under your mother’s watch? Clearly you can travel alone, so I’m sure you could find a way to bus there if you don’t drive.”

Whoa. Gerry blinks and sits back from the table to absorb the onslaught of questions. He hadn’t even considered obstacles like that to be holding him back. For a silent moment, he flounders in his head for a justification for _that,_ if not an answer.

“Um,” is all that comes out. “I don’t have a physical therapist.”

“Oh. I just assumed. Where did you get your ring splints, then?”

Gerry looks down at his hands. He feels the need, now, to hide them over his lap under the table.

“...eBay.”

“...Gerry.”

“Look, alright, it’s—” A short, helpless laugh cuts him off like a lakewater splash. This has never been embarrassing before. “I used to use sports tape, but that’s bad long term and worse for somebody with rubbish skin. My tattoo artist told me she wouldn’t be able to do my hands if I kept irritating them.”

The first thing Abby had done for him was his chest last April, when he had been unable to ignore the cold fog spilling out with his own breaths. She was still an apprentice, and needed the practice, so he offered her his shoulders the week after. Adding on the elbows and wrists had filled May and June with a pleasant pain that managed to ground him more than he expected. It was midsummer when he asked about his hands, and it took until he made it into autumn with his splints for her to start doing the left side.

He taps the splint on his left index with a bitten nail. “These are what I found when I went digging for something that wasn’t a full hand brace or meant for fractures.”

They don’t fit. Not all of them, anyway. He’s lost one or two. But they’re something, and Abby had agreed to do his knuckles after the microtears and redness had healed enough. At least with the ring splints, the tattoos were visible. He could look down and see them framed in silver. Protected, secure.

“It’s much safer to get them custom fitted,” Miriam points out. “I’m appalled that anyone would even sell them secondhand.”

Gerry stares at her. “Lot of people can’t afford to drop over a hundred quid per splint.”

Miriam winces and drops her head. “Yes, of course.” After a long breath, she rubs her fingertips over her eyes. “I know, and not everyone can even get diagnosed. It took years of wrestling with physicians for Jon’s condition to be taken seriously, even _with_ his Beighton score at a full nine.”

His stare shatters itself with a series of blinks. “What’s his diagnosis?”

“Ehlers-Danlos,” she says, brow raised. “I started suspecting something after about the third time he flapped his wrist right out of the socket. I kept a list of symptoms as they arose, brought it to so many doctors that I could just about recite it by rote. The first primary brushed him off as having growing pains. The second fixated on his anxiety and insisted it was psychosomatic. When the third blamed his _autism,_ I think I was genuinely considering arson.”

She rolls her eyes. “Can’t blame any of that for the way he could _bend_. He figured it out himself when he was… what, thirteen? Researched it all on his own. I started cold-calling geneticists and only got a spot on someone’s waiting list set for a year and a half later. It took a second try at _that_ to get it on paper, and by then he was off to university.”

Gerry can feel his face twisting in aversion. “This isn’t really selling me on the whole ‘let’s go to the doctor’ thing. No offense.”

Now Miriam barks a laugh. “Oh, _Lord,_ no. There’s no way that we could tackle this on short notice. I just assumed that you already knew you had it, or at least something similar.”

“Just from looking at me?” 

“I know what to look for, by this point.”

Her faint smile is humourless. Gerry smiles back anyway before his face gets too tired to keep it up and he stares back into his bowl of porridge. His stomach is properly turning. He can’t tell if it’s because he wants that last bite or if it’s because he wouldn’t be able to handle it.

“Besides,” she continues, “you’re the one who sought out assistive devices. You’re telling me you just did that entirely on your own? You went thrifting for that knee brace?”

Gerry shrugs again. “I’m adaptable.”

“I can see that.” Miriam rests her chin in her hand, lets her shoulders loosen while she lets out a slow breath. “I’d much rather you be able to access consistent care, though. Even if you can’t get a magic answer today, we could perhaps try to get you a list of referrals that you can work with in the future.”

Gerry wrinkles his nose. He winces when she tilts her head at him in exasperation.

“You wanted me to be honest with you, right?” he asks. He can only look at her long enough to catch the prompt in the incline of her head before he sits back in his chair.

“I just don’t really see the point in it. If I know what’s wrong with me and I’m dealing with it, what good is fighting with a bunch of doctors going to do? Getting a word put down on paper doesn’t determine whether it’s there or not.”

“Of course not,” Miriam says. “The point is being able to pursue treatment. Maybe even financial aid, other accommodations that might make your life easier.”

Gerry laughs. What the hell sort of accommodations would make his life any easier?

Miriam folds her arms. “We’ve derailed quite a bit from our place on the list. I’d like to go back to what we can realistically address first.”

He can’t unscrew the smile. “My torrid affair with Mrs. O?”

No reaction. “It’s of more immediate importance, I would say.” She looks down to her list again, avoiding his face. “I’m finished pressing about it. I don’t need every detail. That is a conversation you can have with a physician.”

Gerry fights the sudden urge to roll his own eyes at her. The impulse is just as horrifying as it is tempting, and he decides that it’s probably just smarter to hide his face altogether while it’s doing all these crappy things he can’t control. He leans forward onto the table to cover his head with his arms. Leaning against something hard alerts him to the silent laughter rollicking through him in twitches.

Miriam goes quiet. When Gerry manages to get a handle on his snickering, he hauls himself back upright and breathes through the discomfiture that settles over him in its place.

“We’re both out of our depth,” Miriam pipes up. For once, she sounds almost hesitant, embarrassed enough by his poor response to attempt rephrasing. “I don’t want to make a mistake, or for you to continue hurting yourself. Your health is a top priority.”

Dammit. Just when he’d managed to stop laughing.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing,” Gerry tries, shaking his head. “Just— Nevermind, it’s not funny, I’m sorry.”

“What’s wrong?”

A pang of something sudden, like a boomerang ricocheting off his ribs. Sadness? Weird.

“It’s—” Deep breath. “It’s just new, I guess. My mum doesn’t much like how I am, either, but hearing you say—” Stop laughing, stop _laughing._ “It’s just _so different.”_

He doesn’t know how to react. This is clearly the wrong way, of course, but his body doesn’t seem to want to do anything else. What else would it do, cry? Gerry would sooner punch another guy full of wasps.

And it is almost funny, isn’t it? He had to drag himself to Bournemouth and seek out a random woman he met nearly two decades ago for anyone to tell him that he was worth anything. 

It’s different than Abby telling him she won’t tattoo over poorly tended skin. It’s different than the girl he’d saved from the wasps asking him what he was going to do about his burnstings after he told her to go to the A&E for hers. It’s the complete opposite of his mum’s hand twisting in his hair to drag his head up off the pillow when the migraines keep him bedridden. That is never done with the _intent_ of granting him a split second of traction, and relief. It’s not the same.

Gerry would sooner punch another guy full of wasps than cry over it or something, but there aren’t exactly an abundance of those in Miriam’s kitchen. The only other option is inappropriate, wheezing giggles. He’ll take that until he can catch his breath.

Miriam says nothing throughout the fit. Unsettled, no doubt. Maybe weighing whether trying to get through the rest of that list is even worth it if he’s going to act like this, all unhinged and uncooperative. Maybe this sort of thing is where the breaking point is.

What stops him, finally, is a wave of vertigo. He catches his face in his hands and leans his elbows heavy on the table. He murmurs an apology into his bandages, and whispers out another beneath the heels of his palms when it hits him that she may not have heard the first.

She doesn’t respond to it. When she finally speaks, the words are slow and measured.

“I know already that we don’t have much time. But even if you only stay long enough to get through your withdrawals, that’s good enough for me. That’s the worst part, isn’t it?”

Is it? Gerry doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what he dreads more: the sickness of trying to heal, or the idea of being under his mother’s thumb sober. 

It gets worse before it gets better, but what would be better about not being numb? What would be better about being that much more aware of her when she comes into his room without using the door? What would be better about being able to feel _every ounce_ of panic and memory and revulsion and pain whenever she next puts her hands on him? Why would he want to be able to feel that in its entirety? He almost doesn’t care about what the drugs will do to his body if it means he doesn’t have to be present in it.

“Gerry?” chimes the bell buoy in the waves. “Can you tell me what you’re thinking?”

“I don’t know,” he sniffs. “It’s…” 

“Abrupt,” she supplies. “Unfair. I know.”

Gerry nods. “I don’t know if I can do it.”

He hates how miry his voice sounds all of a sudden. Weak, defeated. The slosh in his stomach is briny and burning as it weighs itself down.

“Would it help if I clarify that I’m not asking you to do this for me?” Miriam rests forward against the table, her folded hands nearer now to where his elbows have slid forward on the table. “You don’t need to prove anything to me. I… appreciate that you thought highly enough of me to want to be sober when you came here. But that’s not why you should fight to stay that way.”

Gerry drops his arms forward, a splint clinking on the stone. “I’m tired of fighting.”

“I know you are,” she agrees. “You’ve been fighting since before I met you.”

“So, why should I start up another one?” He feels stupid asking her this, petulant and ungrateful, but he can’t draw the question back in. “This is how I’ve been fighting the rest of it.”

Miriam shakes her head. “This isn’t the sort of armour that will get you through it.”

“It’s gotten me through so far.”

“Has it, though?” She reclaims her hands. “You’re alive, and I’m proud to see that. Don’t mistake my disapproval for disappointment in you. But I can’t simply _leave it_ at telling you that I admire how bravely you’ve fought on your own when I know that you are _not_ beyond aid.”

He stops sulking to glare at her, needled. “How can you know that?”

“Because you’re asking for help. Isn’t that why you came all this way?”

“...Part of it, maybe.” Gerry lowers his head onto his arms. “Not really. I don’t know, I’m sorry.”

“Now, why are you sorry?”

“Because I sort of… I don’t— I don’t know, I think—” He sits up and, again, he laughs. “I think part of it was because I’m pretty sure I’m dying? I thought I should… I don’t know, get my affairs in order. But that’s hard to do when you don’t have any affairs.”

For a moment, Miriam fails to mask her shock. “Well, there’s no need for talk like _that.”_

“I’m serious.”

Gerry does his best not to leave loose ends. The ones that had been cut off when he was in the state to understand the pain had been cauterized. There are a few left, he knows they’re probably out there, but any friends he’s managed to keep for more than a few weeks are kept at a sizable distance. Currently, if he were to count them, it really might just be down to Abby. He knows that her tattoo parlour is an option when he’s at his wits end, and so he hasn’t been in any sort of rush to get them all done. The last thing she’d done for him had been the finishing touches on his right hand, and it’s been weeks.

Beyond that, there’s no one. He might not have even come here if he hadn’t heard that commercial on the radio. He doesn’t have to give Abby some grand farewell; in the end, he’s just another client, and one day they won’t need each other. It’s not like he’s left a long trail of broken hearts behind him that might magically be mended were he to reach out and exchange platitudes of forgiveness. He’s never been that lucky, or loved.

There are people he couldn’t forgive, because he already knows they aren’t sorry. There are people he could simply never hope to find, that must not _want_ to be found if they haven’t looked for him, either. It’s either that or they’ve been dead all this time, and Gerry has no idea how to want that more than being left behind without wishing he was dead, too.

There was really only one experience he didn’t have all the answers to — that he could access, anyway. He’s in no condition to travel, to do research that necessitated more than desperate wandering. To disappear someday without getting at least _some_ of those answers — without _giving_ some — would only hurt his ability to accept the fact that he is certain he will not survive this.

“I just need someone to know about it. But I wanted to let you know that it wasn’t because you… failed me, like you said.” Gerry shakes his head slowly, holding her eyes. “I really hate that you think you failed me. There was nothing you could have done. I knew that even back then. I never wanted to haunt you. I wanted to thank you.

“So, I think I figured… this might be my last chance to maybe give you some closure on it. Then whatever happened afterward would just happen, and it might not be as bad as it might if you just always blamed yourself. Two birds.”

It’s not that difficult to say. The words leave him with the ease of a shrugging shoulder and he doesn’t quite understand why Miriam is looking at him the way she is now. Her eyes are dark and heavy and shining and Gerry is suddenly overwhelmed with the memory of Jon’s helpless, glisterblack stare while they were pried from each other’s arms in the doorway.

The briny sickness in his stomach calcifies into a stone that rises up in his throat when Miriam stands from her chair. Without words, she steps around to place herself beside him. The bones in her chest move unevenly under his cheek when he goes slack in the circle of her arms.

She speaks into his hair an eternity later. Only seconds, most likely, but still long enough for the sound of her voice to drag him from what feels like the fog of a troubled sleep.

“You did this for me, then? Just for me?”

Gerry listens to the thump of her heart under his ear. “And Jon. I wanted to know if he was alright, too.”

He can hear her thinking as she quiets. She rests her chin on the crown of his head.

“Would you like me to call him? He’d be down here within the day if he knew it was you.”

The breath in his mouth goes glacial. It shatters down his throat in crashing slabs of ice, piece by piece, until he can force out, “No. G-d, no, don’t.”

“Why not?” Miriam asks. “If it’s closure you wanted, weren’t you hoping to see him, as well?”

“I mean, _yes,_ but now that—” He folds his arms over his stomach, pressing down against the ache. “I don’t want him to see me like this.”

It would be too much. For all of the imaginary futures he had built for Jon, what kind had Jon built for him if he hadn’t just forgotten? Gerry can’t begin to fathom dismantling whatever he’d come up with. Either he’d grown up some hardened monster-hunting hero, or he’d managed to escape; both of which would be crushed in an instant if Gerry were to show himself for what he’d really become.

Even better, maybe Jon really had come up with some valiant death scene for him, where he’d sacrificed himself for the greater good or saved the world when no one was looking. That’s definitely the kind of thing the kid he knew would have come up with. How can he ruin that with the truth? It’s all so pedestrian. It’s depressing.

Gerry doesn’t want to imagine how Jon would look at him now. He doesn’t even know what _Jon_ looks like now. Trying to imagine a face for him now just makes Gerry’s head throb with inability. All he remembers are the big, black eyes and the heartbreak.

Miriam’s voice drops like a stone through the trembling surface of his thoughts.

“And what about you?”

“What _about_ me?”

“You’re contradicting yourself,” she informs him gently. “I just want to understand what _you_ need. What closure were you seeking for yourself? Not for us. You.”

Gerry takes a breath, and another. The bones in her chest are moving more evenly now, a steady rise and fall under his cheek. There’s a comfort in the way her heart beats.

“It’d have been enough for me,” he decides. “Just seeing for myself that you were even alive. Both of you.”

Miriam hums. It must not sound so strange to her that he could have ever imagined either of them dead. Gerry remembers all at once that the first thing he ever learned about Jon was that he was an orphan.

Now that he’s said it, though, it doesn’t sound true. It isn’t enough.

“That’s really all?” Miriam asks. She must hear it, too. “That’s something you held onto all this time?”

Gerry shrugs.

“Not like I obsessed over it. Didn’t even know it was bothering me so much until I heard that number on the radio. Not really sure when it faded into the background.”

It all muddles together. He’s met plenty of people since. He’s watched plenty of them die, or heard about it well after the fact. He’s held plenty of hands in the meantime, and he’s let go of them all.

“I’m a very… transient individual,” he says carefully. “Never stayed anywhere very long. Never went to school. No long term friends, no other family I’ve ever met. Usually see the start and finish to everything, you know? Never left with many questions. I watch everything end.”

“Except for this,” Miriam affirms for him. “You still had a question.”

Gerry nods. “I know I hurt you by being here. I wanted to say I was sorry for that, at least. Then we could all just… stop wondering. Go our separate ways.”

It sounds increasingly more stupid the longer he tries to justify it. A lie, bleached hollow like suffering coral. Gerry wishes he could take it back, could take it all back, but all he can do is press his face into her blouse as her grip on him tightens. He’s long past knowing when his eyes started to well.

“I don’t think you believe that,” she whispers. “Not really.”

“What other option is there?”

Even if he were to listen, even if he were to try — how long would it last? What good would it really do, in the end? Her clear suggestions don’t sway his stalemate. It doesn’t make the decision for him.

Miriam’s hand comes up over the side of his head, her fingertips threading into his hair. Gerry’s eyes shut tight: this is when the fist closes, when the cry of pain is torn out of him by the harsh jerk of his head to one side. He waits for the lights to pop in his vision as he’s dragged from his chair and thrown bodily to the ground.

It doesn’t come. Miriam gentles her fingers through a tangle by his ear, and it doesn’t feel like a beheading. A chill climbs down the back of his neck like a many-legged thing, but the only pain he feels is deep in his chest. He is struck with the humiliating realization that he hasn’t washed his hair in a few days. Miriam’s hand moves back up when the knot is undone, and cards through the strands again now that they’re looser.

“So many, Gerry. You have so many choices.”

It doesn’t feel like it. It’s never felt like that. Gerry doesn’t have the energy to tell her why he disagrees. Miriam is so focused on so much else, and she makes it sound so _real._ He can’t remember the last time he thought that simple, human pain could hold a candle to the sheer magnitude of everything else going on in the dark.

No. No, the last time he’d thought that was when he stuck his hand into a black swarm of wasps to save the girl with the cluster of clovers tucked behind her ear. He thinks it all the time. He just can’t remember the last time he thought his own pain mattered half as much.

He doesn’t understand how that’s all Miriam seems to care about. Some part of him wants to uncover it, and riddle it out. To know exactly what put the agony lines around her eyes so long ago if she’s never shone a light into the sort of shadows that baptized him.

She makes his mother’s world seem ignorant.

“You’re choosing to let me touch you right now,” she says, like it’s as significant as a ritual. “You could have pushed me away, and still can. You made a choice, and you’re still making it. Right?”

It occurs to him that Miriam is swaying, gently, from side to side. If he keeps his eyes closed, it’s like being out on the water. It almost neutralizes the nausea, the headache.

She calls his name again to prompt a response. Gerry can’t decide whether to shake his head or nod, so he settles for the truth in between.

“I guess,” he mumbles. “Not sure I can move.”

Miriam’s hand goes still in his hair. “Are you choosing to let me support you through that, then, or are you leaning on me because you think it’s what I want you to do?”

Gerry tries to decide which one feels less pathetic. Miriam takes a long pause before she speaks again.

“If you changed your mind, I would let you go. It’s important to me that you know that.”

It takes a moment for that to sink in. It takes a moment longer for him to say, “I know.”

He doesn’t sit up and away from her. Her hand moves through his hair again.

“You also chose to stay here last night,” she reminds him. “Or _did_ you consider leaving, and just couldn’t?”

Gerry doesn’t have to answer that one. She wouldn’t have asked if she didn’t already know the answer. Finally, her hand moves down to his jaw to keep his head from lolling without the support of her sternum, and steps back enough that he can see her face again. She drops her hand back to his shoulder. He fights to honour her request and keep his head up.

“Let me put it this way, Gerry. I don’t want you to run away from the prospect of getting help. I want you to be _able_ to run when you _need to._ You’ll need to get your health right so that you can take control of the situations that make you feel like you have no choice in the matter. Even ones like this. Does that make sense at all?”

And here he’d spent all this time thinking she may have held that book in her own hands for too long before she passed it to Jon. That Jon had been touched by it strongly enough to rub off on her. That the secrets they’d all kept had only filled the house with cobwebs and deceit. That her lies to him were a result of something that would only fester and augment after he was gone, and he wouldn’t get to swat the silkstrings off of her sleeves the way he had swatted them off of Jon’s in the park.

When she sets her hand on the edge of the table, Gerry’s eyes fall to her ring; not on the insect enshrined in the drop of amber, but the sterling band that holds it together. He thumbs at the splint on his index finger, and thinks he understands something that he didn’t before.

“Yeah,” he says, rubbing a sleeve under his nose. “Does.”

“Good.” Miriam pulls in a sharp breath and lets it out with cleansing force. She steps further back now, but her hand only leaves his elbow when Gerry has safely leaned against the table again. She reaches across for her list and pulls it over to sit between them.

“Can we pick up where we left off?”

Gerry rubs at his eye with the back of his hand, the scratch of gauze grazing almost soothingly on the sore bite on his cheek. “Sure. Sorry. Where were we?”

Another deep breath as she scans the bullet points. “Speaking to a physician about your habit.”

Right. “You’re giving me a choice here?”

Miriam nods. “I won’t force you to go.”

“But you think I should.”

She lifts her eyes to him, the shrug of her shoulder a softened synonym for agreement. 

“If there’s any time to try committing to detox, it’s now. If there’s any place, it’s here.”

Imaginary razor wire constricts around a swell of nausea that is very, very real in its power. Gerry swallows with difficulty. “You really think I can do it?”

Miriam’s gaze remains firm. “If you need to hear me say that I believe in you, then yes. I wouldn’t suggest that you enter a battle I didn’t think you could win.”

If the storm in his stomach were purely figurative, it might have broken all at once with a shock of sunlight and stillness. The words might bring more relief were it not for the burgeoning chaos in his body, and Gerry finds himself resentful of the sickness for withholding that feeling from him. He wants to believe in her belief. He wants to _want_ the relief that would come with it more than he wants the relief of going numb.

It might not last. It already hurts. Gerry thinks he just wants to make sure that Miriam never stops looking at him the way she is now. Her eyes are dark and heavy, and he thinks she really sees him.

“Alright,” he says. “I’ll go. I’ll try.”

Her eyes slide shut for a moment as she lets out a slow breath, and her nod is more like rocking. When she looks up again, it’s to glance back at the list.

“I didn’t have much beyond that. Just some simpler things.”

“Shoot.”

“I told you that I would be asking you to make lists while you’re here. I’d like to start very small, before we go anywhere today.”

As he opens his mouth to ask his own question, there is a _thud_ on the chair beside him. The Lioness of Brittany stretches from her perch on the seat to heft herself up onto the table, crossing in front of him to headbutt Miriam’s open palm. The sight of her is an odd relief. He reaches out a hand to her, too, and she turns her attention to him without a moment’s hesitation.

“My priorities, right?” he asks. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”

“Start with what you’d like to do before we go to the A&E. The wait time will be atrocious, I’m sure, so you might want to prepare somehow. Take a shower, lie down for a while, help me decide on a lunch to bring.” She waves a hand. “You could go through the bookshelves for something to bring along with you.”

Gerry bites back a wince. He glances down at where his hair has fallen over his shoulders, considering. “Might want to shower, if that’s alright.”

If he can get up, that is. He realizes now just how cemented he feels to this chair. The mere prospect of standing up sends a spike of protest through him like an electric current. He’s sort of proud of how he’d been handling the nausea, but he’s been totally stationary for a while now. He’s sure that once he starts moving, he won’t be able to say the same for his heart.

It’s humiliating, but he has to tell her. Miriam doesn’t deserve the shock of watching him pass out without at least knowing it’s such a risk.

“I’m… not so sure I can make it up the stairs, though.”

“That’s fine,” she says breezily. “There’s a shower down here. I’ll go up and get your bag for you.”

A petty sense of guilt tickles at Gerry’s throat. He can’t argue. He agreed to be honest. He knows he can’t go up the stairs. It’s better this way. It’s not a big deal.

“...Thanks,” he mutters. “Sorry.”

Miriam crosses her arms. “I’m not going to make you do a thousand trips up and down the stairs when it’s hard enough for you to cross a room in a straight line. It’s alright.”

Gerry stares at the Lioness, focused on his administration of neck scratches. “Little mortifying when you put it like that.”

She shifts in his periphery. “I’m sorry. I only mean that—”

“It’s fine,” he says. “You’re actually speaking my language. It’s just weird to have it turned on me.”

Now she huffs a quick laugh, and so does he. She walks around his chair to reach for his bowl and empty glass, her hand trailing across the back of his shoulders. “Are you finished with this?”

He nods, and she goes about her cleaning. The Lioness sits down on top of the list, obscuring it entirely but for a single corner. Some pointless little whisper in his head informs him that Norwegian forest cats were the chosen cats of Vikings. It makes sense that Miriam would choose one if she’s so enamoured with sailing.

The untended list is tempting, though. Gerry drums his fingertips on the table some distance away to lure the Lioness away from it. She follows with impatient intent, rolling onto his hand to trap it underneath her shoulder as her purring reaches a crescendo. If the list concerns him, if Miriam were reading it aloud, then it shouldn’t be a crime to look it over. Understand fully what she expects of him.

Beneath the questions she managed to get through, there are only a few she skipped over completely. There is a line drawn through the word _“Alcohol?”_ at the top of the list, a few other sub questions crossed out underneath when she received unhelpful answers about how often he goes to the doctor on his own. His eyes skip to the bottom of the list.

Gerry lingers on the string of question marks. It’s almost reassuring that she doesn’t have all the answers, actually. For all of her conviction, she’s making this up as she goes, too.

The Lioness of Brittany stands up when the faucet turns off, abandoning Gerry’s hand for the edge of the table nearer to Miriam. Gerry slides the list away when she turns towards him, playing idly with the back of his lip piercing.

“I’ll go get your bag.” She hangs up the dish towel when she’s finished drying her hands. “Don’t rush to get up just yet. I’m slow on the stairs, too.”

Gerry watches her go until it hurts to turn his neck to look over his shoulder, and then he looks back at the Lioness. The list. The third to last bullet, underlined and written over itself so many times that its importance leaps off the page.

“Hey, what the hell does she mean by this one, huh?” he asks in a whisper to the Lioness as she crosses back over to him, bending forward over the table to meet her nose to nose. “Do you know? What do you know that I don’t?”

Nothing she can communicate, at any rate. By the time Miriam returns, Gerry has both hands buried in the Lioness’ fur at her back and her belly, scratching gently with his fingertips while she sprawls and stretches. Miriam doesn’t have the bag with her; she must have dropped it off in the bathroom.

“Are you ready?” she asks him, positioned off to his left. Her hands are outstretched between them, palm up and offering.

Gerry lifts his head from where he’d let it rest heavy on the table between his arms, squinting at her over his sleeve. The granite was cool on his cheek; he doesn’t quite want to give that up. Doesn’t want to stop petting the Lioness, doesn’t want to face exactly how weak his legs are bound to be once he puts pressure on them again.

But he wants to stop feeling like a sunken stone, so he has to.

The Lioness chirps in protest when Gerry reclaims his hands, and he shushes her with a promise to give her attention later. He swivels to swing his legs over the side of his seat and slides to get his feet back on the floor, his hands braced on the back of the chair and the edge of the table. Miriam’s hands are still open and waiting. After a few deep breaths, he reaches out.

It’s her fingertips digging into the grooves of his elbows that brings him back into focus. The transition from chair to open air is one he missed, but somehow he’s upright and gripping tightly onto Miriam’s forearms for purchase. 

She’s saying his name again, once, twice. The third time earns a woozy groan, another deep breath. A sighing murmur of, “I’m okay,” that’s only faintly slurred before he gets his eyes back open.

“You’re okay,” she repeats back. It carries over the white noise. “I’ve got you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **CW: drug addiction; drug withdrawal; references to mary's abuse; medical talk (about EDS, and a bit about gerry's POTS); brief ableism (when miriam talks about jon's doctors); not Quite suidical ideation but still the topic of feeling like he's dying so watch out; brief talk about the corruption using TMA canon-typical language**
> 
> TRANSCRIPT OF MIRIAM'S LIST:  
>  _"- Any other health concerns?  
>  \- How long does he realistically plan to stay?  
> \- Jon  
> \- Get his phone number  
> \- ????"_
> 
> anybody recognize abby the tattoo artist? consider reading [head in the lion's mouth](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23465605/chapters/56254891) for the real kicker! [the GTCU](https://docs.google.com/document/d/14KlgPfOb16ocGj8k0QrElw6UY0SqoNeH2yTj_zQ31bA/edit#heading=h.dzv44qu1cgjs) never sleeps - keep an eye out for her in pharos by right, too! (where you will ALSO learn more about the bee thing! go figure!)
> 
> catch me on tumblr @[gerrydelano](http://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/) as always!


	12. eye splice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gerry becomes aware of the weight of his breath in his chest with a rush of confusing clarity. He coughs into his sleeves as he wipes his face dry, lifting up the paper storybook.
> 
> “He kept this?”
> 
> “I kept it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> alternatively: gerry gets nosy and snoops through jon's room. a beholder can only hold out for so long. 💪😔
> 
>  _please_ check out [this gorgeous title piece for chapter eleven](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/617665352774615040/) by @boneroutes! 
> 
> **CWs in the end notes** , and some surprise art :-)
> 
> suggested listening: [good grief - dessa](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpb1gJyMKIs)

_eye splice - a sailmaker’s technique of creating a permanent loop in the end of a rope_

───── ☆ ─────

It’s a lot like painting. The way it moves. The way it doesn’t.

Time, that is. Time moves in eddies and stains in bloody acrylic and saltsoaks the canvas clean all in one surging, slowfast, floodsick motion. 

The canvas being his body, of course. Inside, outside. Makes him feel like Van Gogh with the yellow paint, but his is all red and only some of it had been swallowed on purpose. Rest of it just grew. All caked over itself under the skin like some backwards growing mould, bruising the organs and bones with colour no one can see.

He’d fainted at the check-in desk. Saw it coming. Warned Miriam in the car before they even reached the A&E, after they’d needed to stop roadside so he could retch. That had been a false alarm, but the trial of heaving did something to his head. Heavylight — waversight. Getting out of the car again opened up his heart like a starting gate at a horse race; it was mere minutes before his blood tore past the danger line, and then kept running.

The walk was long, and terrifying. The fall itself was slow.

Not the worst that could have happened. Got to skip the waiting room. Woke up to a needlestream of saline in his left arm and Miriam sitting off to his right with a magazine, calm as anything. Gerry wondered if she worked so hard to look that way for his sake or her own. He remembers the hands around his arms before it went grey and quiet.

She greeted him with a clipboard full of intake papers. There were spots she couldn’t fill in for him, but she had put herself down as his emergency contact.

Rest of it blurs. They got home in the evening, and went back the next day, and the next. For observation, safe dosages of whatever other drugs they said were supposed to help with the pain, substitutions to level out his idiot decision to go cold turkey. Some other tests he doesn’t remember the names of, or the reasons for.

He comes and goes. The 72-hour mark was like taking a knife to the red paint and scraping away at it. It’s supposed to free the canvas. Make it light. It hurts so badly that he can’t sleep. It hurts so badly that he can’t stand to stay awake. 

The liminal space in between is steeped with a hum, low and dolorous. He moves his hand underneath his pillow to check for the knobs of a conch shell, and never finds it; there is never anything but cool cotton and the weight of his skull and all its burdens. The cloying paste of oil paints dilutes impossibly into watercolour and when he cracks his eyes open in the middle of the night he expects to find the pillow dyed under his ear, soaked through with the outpour of what is being slowly wrung out of him.

The pillow stays spotless. There’s just more space in his head for the sound as the swell of tissue and tide settle ever slightly more into a sleepier sort of soreness every day.

The hum is a song. It’s a voice, and it’s not pouring out, but in.

It all runs together in a muddy swirl until one day Gerry wakes up in Jon’s bed and his head doesn’t hurt quite as much. The curtains are shut tight, but the fabric is thin enough to tell him that the sun is setting. They’re blue, like the walls used to be, once. The walls are sort of golden now, like wet sand.

The Lioness of Brittany is curled up against the dip of his side, and there is a thermos on the bedside table next to a small package of salted Delser crackers. Broth is the most he’s been able to keep down for a few days now. Only recently have the crackers graduated past the classification of “pushing it.”

He can’t begin to guess how long the food has been sitting there. Miriam’s gotten good at timing when she checks in on him. It’s not necessary to wake him every time, but catching him half-dreaming has proven disastrous.

She’s only scared him once or twice, but it was enough. He scared her back by gasping himself blind, flinching himself younger. Lost track of himself until he heard her calling his name past the hard press of the pillow over his ears. 

Miriam never crossed over to touch him, to shake him out of the fright by hand. She never left until he remembered where he was, and who she wasn’t.

He’s alone now, at least. It’s almost a shame to sit up and disturb the cat, but now that he’s opened his eyes, Gerry doesn’t think he can close them again. He’s spent too long drifting in and out of fitful spells of sleep and clenching his jaw through staring contests with the ceiling. It’s time to be awake.

By the time he manages to sit himself up against the headboard, the Lioness of Brittany has decided that he is no longer a suitable cushion. She drops down off the side of the mattress with a _thunk_ that he’s sure Miriam could hear from downstairs and crosses over to paw at the door, meowing for freedom.

Gerry hauls himself out of bed, slow and mumbling for her to wait for him. He manages to make it to the door without much of a waver, and so considers it a success when he only has to reach for the desk for balance after he’s already set the Lioness loose.

He hasn’t looked at the desk even once since getting here. He hasn’t looked around this room at all, it feels like. Gerry can’t quite decide if that’s weirder than if he had gone through it on the first night. Does it get weirder the longer he waits? He’s curious. He’s bored.

Gerry drops into the rolling chair to get off his feet, wheeling himself over to the far side of the desk. In the corner against the wall, there’s a glass paperweight with the solar system laser engraved inside it, set neatly beside a cup of quality mechanical pencils. Gerry would think Jon would have brought those with him if he were going off to school or something, but maybe that’s just the part of him that hasn’t sat down and sketched a damn thing in so long, and misses it desperately. Might borrow them later, if he finds scrap paper in one of these drawers.

What he’s met with when he opens one is a narrow selection of nothings, all old headphone wires and paperclips and cheaper, chewed pens. Some stacked envelopes and small, worn-out memo pads — years old, judging by the sloppy math equations and half-hearted history notes scribbled inside them. The most interesting thing is a collection of old playbills; _Twelve Angry Men, Fiddler on the Roof, Eurydice._

Bit of a hoarder, then. Not that strange. Gerry flips through the playbills, folding them back into the drawer when his eyes stop registering the text as anything meaningful.

Most of the boxes around seem to be plain old storage, more Miriam’s doing than Jon’s. Gerry pushes away from the desk to spin around and squint about the room, scanning shelving and corners for something that’ll catch.

It’s when he turns back around that he sees something folded up against the side of the desk. Wires stem from one end of it, strewn about the floor. It crinkles in his hand when he pulls it free: a plastic Dance Dance Revolution mat, the words _“Stay Cool!”_ stamped across the posing, blue silhouette in the center.

G-d, it’s just so _normal._

He still doesn’t know who to picture when he tries to imagine Jon opening this up and just dancing around his bedroom, sliding dangerously on his socks and only barely escaping a nosebleed in recompense. His brain doesn’t know what train of thought to focus on: Jon in all his facelessness, or the basic concept of dancing for points.

There are photographs all over the place downstairs, but Gerry hasn’t taken the time to study the people in them yet. He doesn’t tend to stray from the limited pathway he has shamblecarved through this house for himself, the few pit stops he makes on his way to Jon’s bed before the cycle begs repeating.

Doorway to couch, to regain his strength after the hospital while Miriam drifts around the kitchen. The table, to experimentally see if he could stomach any of the complicatedly vague food items the doctors instructed him to prioritize. After he fails, it’s back to the couch until he can make it up the stairs. From there, he only gets out of bed if he can find footholes between the body-wracking coughs that call time of death on his progress. He’s pretty sure that he’d spent a few hours on the bathroom tile once before Miriam discovered him while she was dropping off a plate of orange slices, three-quarters asleep against the porcelain edge of the tub. That had been a nice detour. Temperature was peaceful.

And so much of all of it has been spent with his eyes at least half-closed. If Jon is hanging anywhere on the walls, his photograph can most certainly see Gerry far more clearly than Gerry can see him in his mind even after being here for so long. There are no pictures of him in this room, or in the upper halls, or conveniently in line with where Gerry’s gaze tends to land when he’s lying bleary-eyed on the couch after a day so long that he doesn’t feel like he’d even lived it.

But this is evidence that Jon had gone and done it, right? Gotten to just be a child, a teenager? If he’s got things like this stored up in here like he’ll come back to it someday, that must mean he hadn’t just gotten tired of it. Outgrown it, gone bitter, been too distracted by bigger things to be entertained by the small. Whatever went on between him and Miriam, Jon could at least just hop around in his room and have fun every now and then.

It’s not like Gerry _never_ could, or hadn’t. It’s just that he has a hard time drawing simpler memories like that up to the surface. It’s like rod fishing in a tar pit.

Still, thinking about Jon just dancing around on this slippery, plastic mat in his bedroom as a teenager makes his eyes itch with pinpricks. Is it envy, or relief? It just hurts more than he thinks it should. Gerry unfolds the mat like a blanket over his lap and drags his nails along the plastic for the faint zipping sound.

He almost wants to plug the thing in and see if he can still do it. It’s not like he’s never been to an arcade and played Dance Dance Revolution himself. He knows how.

It’s more a matter of whether he can stay balanced. If he can hold himself up enough to do it, or if he’ll just slip and crash to the floor and worry Miriam downstairs and oh, Jesus, she’d worry, wouldn’t she? She’d be worried. Not annoyed, or angry, or amused, but she’d ask anxiously if he’s alright. She wouldn’t tell him what he already knows — that he’s reckless, thoughtless, only hurting himself. She’d just do what she did at the A&E in reverse; make sure he got up _off_ the ground in one piece.

Gerry doesn’t know how he would react to that. It feels like he’s running low on excuses like delirium and brain fog and syncope. Eventually, he’d have to pick something to admit.

The dance mat fits neatly in its place again when he folds it back up. There would be more left to explore than the bookcase on the other side of the room, he thinks, if Miriam hadn’t packed so much of it up. As it stands, that’s where his eyes fall next.

This wasn’t here all those years ago. Gerry’s pretty sure there was a smaller one, the top of it covered in figurines and trinkets, but this one is taller than he is. Books and bric-a-brac crowd each of the six shelves, save for a few hollow spaces here and there that must have housed things Jon couldn’t bear to part with. There’s no immediate sign of the dinosaur encyclopedia Gerry remembers. Did Jon still care enough about that to take it with him when he left? Or had he eventually gotten rid of it entirely?

Gerry runs his fingers along the spines of what’s in reach, head tipped to read the titles. A lot of nonfiction, scientific references. Enough geology and biology in the undermost portion to make sense alongside what Gerry recalls, but outnumbered by astronomy and physics that sit in the middle, in reach and clearer focus. In the space between two books there is a small model rocket, and between two more there is an opened box full of half-sticky glow-in-the-dark decals that must have brought the nighttime ceiling to life, once upon a time.

So, he’d given up the downbelow for star study. Interesting.

Carefully, Gerry lowers himself out of the rolling chair and onto the floor to explore the very bottom shelf. This is where all the fiction has been delegated, it seems. The younger things. The so much older.

To the left of the shelf, there is a cluster of seven books in a clear set, unbent and pristine, and the middlemost spine reads _The Lives of Christopher Chant._ Gerry reaches for it before the ones that precede it in the story.

Distantly, he thinks he recalls Jon saying he wouldn’t read it again. Why not donate them with his dinosaur figurines, with all the other things he’d outgrown? Maybe they were waiting to sell them when their value increased with time. Gerry surmises that he’d have to read them if he were to understand any sentimentality behind it.

He hadn’t wanted to, back then. Still not sure he does, but at least it’s an option for now if he’s got nothing else to do. If his hands don’t cooperate with sketching with those mechanical pencils, and if his brain ever decides it can process written words.

For now, he trades _The Lives of Christopher Chant_ for the first one in the series and sets that on the rolling chair. He’ll take it with him when he stands up. Maybe the glowing star decals, too. Even if it’s only for one night or so, Gerry thinks he wants to see what it’s like to look up at a ceiling and see the cavernous black filled with something gentle like that. If he can’t stand up and reach, the wall beside him should do.

The entire row is overflowing with books on top of books, crammed up against the shelf above to the point where it takes effort to pull them free without bringing them all down at once. It’s after Gerry has scooted to the far right side to wrestle chapter books and sketchpads loose and toss them onto the floor that he finds the manila envelope. He undoes the clasp and pours Polaroid photographs onto his lap.

The first one he inspects is sun-streaked and crooked. The landscape is all but diagonal between corners when he turns it right-side-up in his hands, and the most he can make out are two basic colours: blue and grey. It’s a photograph of the beach, desaturated with time and film quality.

He spreads the rest of them out on the floor: a few shots of the open ocean, a long pier, bright kites like pressed flowers in the sky. Gerry could have convinced himself that they were entirely nebulous were it not for the cluster of six different shots of a sea turtle carved into the sand, the pair of small hands sneaking into the frame of one to brush debris from its sculpted face. Were it not for the individual photograph of a laughing child collapsed on the shore, captured in the process of rolling onto his back as the tide withdraws away from him.

On a base level, the child is unrecognizable. There is a kite spool clutched in both of his hands, cradled to his chest in victory, and one leg of his cuffed trousers is soaked dark with ocean water. His brown hair is short and scruffy and windblown. The smile on his face is so wide that it leaves no room for open eyes. He has no idea he’s being photographed.

Gerry wants to rebel against the knowledge that a candid photo of him _smiling_ as a _child_ — quite possibly the only one in existence — has been hidden _here_ all these years. That he is looking at himself through Jon’s eyes, and that he can’t remember being that person.

The only other items in the envelope are a stack of papers tied together with blue embroidery floss and a spiral-bound notebook. Every sheet is brimming with lilting children’s handwriting, smattered with ink and crayon wax and every kind of honest falsehood. There is a wrongness to them both.

_Time and Place_ is a dream come shattered; he almost can’t stand to open it. The survival guide, meanwhile, is more of a death wish — one glance at the first page alone is enough for Gerry to realize with alarming devastation that had Jon ever turned to his experience for help, it would have failed him.

Of course there is no mention of the Fourteen. He hadn’t known yet. It’s all muddled with half-comprehended encounters and the desperate rounds of Mad Libs that his mind had played to make sense of what he thought he saw. He doesn’t recognize everything here, all of the diagrams and references. Had he made some of this up when Jon asked him for stories? Had he remembered wrong? Or has he just forgotten in the wake of all that came after?

A shock of cold grips the back of his neck. Miriam is standing in the doorway.

Gerry becomes aware of the weight of his breath in his chest with a rush of confusing clarity. He coughs into his sleeves as he wipes his face dry, lifting up the paper storybook.

“He kept this?”

“I kept it.”

Gerry stares up at her. The weight in his chest has hollowed itself out. Miriam crosses over to the bedside table, frowning at the thermos when lifts it with her fingertips to weigh its contents.

“You didn’t even touch this?” she asks. “I left it ages ago.”

Gerry ducks his head. “Forgot. Sorry.”

She gives a little grunt of acknowledgement, reaching for the crackers with her other hand. “That’s alright. It’s still hot.”

He holds up a hand to stop her as she starts to step towards him. “Wait, it’s fine. I’ll come over there.”

His legs are falling asleep. He doesn’t know how long he’s been sitting here, but it’s been long enough that he knows he should stretch. Miriam stays over by the bed as Gerry gathers up the Polaroids and drops them back into the envelope, stacking the books on top of it to tuck under his arm. He uses the chair as leverage to stand, slowly, and scoops up the things he’d left on the seat to take with him when he drifts over to sit on the edge of the mattress.

Miriam opens the thermos and pours broth into the cap. He thanks her with a sniff, accepting it with the hand that isn’t rubbing a thumb over the metal spine of the notebook.

“Why?” he asks after he’s drained the cap. “I mean, why would _you_ keep all this stuff?”

She gives a heavy sigh, her palms rubbing down to her knees. “It’s… not easy to talk about.”

Gerry huffs a laugh. “Think that’s just our trademark by this point.”

Miriam reaches for the cap to refill it. Gerry takes the brief moment to press his free hand to his stomach, kneading at the anxious helix forming in his gut.

“Jon became… very forgetful, when things died down after he transferred schools.” The words are stiff and laboured. “It was as if he’d packed entire pieces of his life into a box and put them away. After a point, I just let him.”

The helix sprouts spikes. Gerry wants to pass the cap back to her. Instead he holds onto it numbly, preparing himself to try and drink it without struggle.

Miriam stares ahead through his conflict. “Unfortunately, this eventually came to include you.”

“Ah.” Gerry winces at himself. It’s not actually surprising. It just stings. “So, that’s why you haven’t pushed me to call him.”

“Some of it, yes. I was afraid to open it all back up.” Miriam rubs her temples now. “I still am. I think I just wouldn’t want to risk triggering something over the phone. It’s too precarious for that. I think it needs to happen someday, but you should both be prepared. You’re not ready yet as it is, so there’s been no need to rush him.”

Gerry forces himself to drink the soup if only so he doesn’t have to hold it anymore. A wave of seasick almost makes him regret it, but it passes after a moment more of wincing. Miriam takes the cap and sets it on the bedside table. Gerry looks back down at the book in his lap.

“Doesn’t explain why you kept this, though. If he did forget.”

Miriam casts a dark look down at the notebook. “I hate that thing. It’s always disturbed me.”

“He didn’t show it to you, did he?”

She all but snorts. “No, it was an accident. I’d gone to turn his bedroom light off on my way to bed and saw he’d fallen asleep with it open.”

Gerry hands it over to her when she reaches for it and watches her flip it open to the middle. There is a terrible creature spanning both pages, red and pink and dripping like it had been skinned. Its eyes are crooked and yellow, its open mouth a drooping vortex that hangs down to its chest like a soft watch in _The Persistence of Memory._

“This one, here.” There is a faint tremor to Miriam’s voice that Gerry tries to ignore. “It took everything I had not to just take it from him right then and put it through the shredder.”

There is nothing in the statement that causes Gerry to connect the urge with his mother. Any destruction she’s caused to his belongings has never been born out of fear, or the desire to protect him.

“You just… asked him about it, then?”

“How could I not?” Her brow is troubled when she looks at him. “But when I suggested that we get rid of it, he…” 

She narrows her eyes, shakes her head slowly at the door. “I won’t describe it as a fit. That makes it sound trivial. I never suggested throwing it away again.” 

Gerry swallows. “Did… did he tell you I helped him make it?”

“That’s the reason I let it be. He clung to it for quite some time before things started to get hazy.” She makes hateful eye contact with the monster on the page before she closes the book and hands it back to Gerry. “You’d both been through something. I couldn’t take away the only evidence of solidarity he had, even if I didn’t understand it.”

Gerry almost wishes she had. It’s stupid, but the longer he looks at this thing, the more embarrassed he is by how little he’d known.

“I could make a better one now,” he muses. 

“What?” It’s not quite a snap, but she is startled.

Gerry opens the book again, flipping for a page more heavy in writing. Beside a drawing of a narrow-faced, wolfish creature with too many eyes, there is a block of text that had been crossed out in red marker, the words _NO: RUN_ inscribed above it as a correction.

“This was me,” Gerry says, tapping it with two fingers. “I always said he should run. I’d tell him that now, too, but at least the rest of it might be more accurate if running wasn’t an option.”

He doesn’t have to look at her to guess at the expression on her face. He closes the book to reopen it at the first page, tapping at the collection of spindly legs emerging from a tall, black rectangle.

“Did he ever say anything about spiders? Get really scared of them all of a sudden?”

Miriam bristles. “How did you—?”

“This thing,” Gerry says, angling the page towards her. “This is how we met.”

He knows when she goes rigid that she’s pondering his sanity. He’s heard it all before. What _she_ hasn’t heard is the truth. The time to protect Jon’s privacy on the matter has long passed, especially if he’s taken such pains to avoid her. Especially if she had been letting him keep everything in a box. This has been tormenting her, too.

That, and there is a sense of relief in just _saying_ it. Gerry might still think it’s selfish were it not for all of the evidence. 

The deafening windsound in his ears when he first found the envelope went silent when Miriam opened the door. He has been woken up by seashell resonance from nowhere and slumped downstairs only to catch her humming the same tune in front of the kitchen sink. He had come here with dizzy spells and no power to blame them on, and it was her boatrock embrace that nullified them.

She deserves to know. She already knows.

“You told me you’d met in the park,” Miriam says, slowly. “Someone was being rough with him, and you stepped in. You had a bruise on your face.”

Gerry nods. “That happened first. He stole Jon’s book, so we followed him to get it back.”

How does he explain the rest without completely losing her? You can’t make eldritch bug-book murder sound normal. No going back now.

“Then we watched him get eaten by a giant spider.”

Perfect. Spectacular. Five stars.

Miriam doesn’t seem to agree. Gerry isn’t sure what her expression is doing, but it doesn’t spell out unshakeable faith. He meets her eyes and, for once, feels more steady than she looks by comparison.

“You don’t believe me.”

“I— I’m going to need you to at _least_ elaborate.”

She’s doing a remarkable job restraining herself, he’ll give her that. He almost expected her to at least check him for a fever. He must sound that much more credible now that he’s caught up on about ten years worth of lost sleep.

Still, he should try to make it easier for her.

“Hm… Alright. For starters, this guy was at least a teenager. Way too old to just be shoving kids around. Did you know anybody like that before everything happened? Did you notice when he disappeared?”

Miriam’s eyes drift to a nondescript spot on the floor, her forehead creasing with thought. It only takes a second for her hand to rise to her mouth, her gaze flickering back to Gerry with visible distress.

“Thomas Tate,” she breathes. “He ran errands for me, he— he just vanished not too long after that weekend. His parents asked me to pass out missing flyers at work.”

“Well, he vanished that Thursday. But yeah, that sounds about right.”

Miriam curls her fist, mouth pressed hard against her knuckles. With her other hand, she points to the open page in the book. “What does that have to do with this?”

Gerry looks down at the page. Some part of him wonders if it was a bad omen to draw it. To keep it in mind. He can’t reverse the damage he’d done by taking part in it. The least he can do is own up.

So, he tells her from the beginning.

Gerry surprises himself with how much he remembers; now that he’s talking about it, the clearer the whole of it feels. The story leaves him like a breath of fresh air in all its horrors, so much easier to spell out than his own medical information and hurts. Miriam seems to be at a loss now that the stone she has been squeezing has finally decided to bleed.

But she listens. She doesn’t interrupt, even when he pauses to slide down onto the floor and lean back against the side of the bed. Hard to tell a story with his lungs slouched into halves. Easier to sit up straight with something behind him.

Her face is hard to read when he cranes his head back to look at her. There is still a measure of uncertainty there, and so Gerry flips to find a specific page in the notebook. Handing it back to her, he asks, “What did you think was going on here?”

Miriam grimaces down at it in her lap. “I tried not to think about this one.”

The focus of the page is a slightly disproportionate drawing of a human leg. Closed tightly around the ankle is an ashen handprint, the palm of it bruised with an overlap of purples and blues. At the very bottom of the page is another black rectangle, this one long and horizontal, out from which a spiny arm snakes out to splay its fingers. The top of the page reads _UNDER THE BED (GERMANY)._

As she studies it, Gerry rolls up the right leg of his pyjamas.

The handprint itself is higher up on his leg than it is in the drawing. It has stretched and distorted with time, but the petalbloom of purpleblue pooling in the center is as vibrant as it had been the night he got it. Touching it now, Gerry can feel the phantom press of fangs set in the lipless palm, framing the sharp bite of a lancing marrowthorn. Glassy giggles had soaked coldly through the blanket bunched around his neck, challenging him to open his eyes in a twisted take on peek-a-boo. It only sought to drag him under when he finally agreed to play the game.

“Me, too,” he says. “But it still hurts sometimes.”

Gerry only hears the first beat of her strangled inhale before an electrical hum picks up in the air. It takes until Miriam breathes back out for the ringing to die back down. If Gerry didn’t know what he was looking for now, he might have missed it.

Her hand comes down over his shoulder when he sways, her momentary distress put on the shelf for him. Her fingers are cool against his cheek when he lets his head drop.

Now isn’t the time to tell her what she’s touched by. She’s overwhelmed by what has touched him, even if she does her best to hide it. It doesn’t seem that she can speak yet.

Gerry twists to peer up to see where she had deposited the notebook. Miriam reclaims her hand when he reaches for it to pull it back into his own lap and curls quietly against the side of the bed. It doesn’t bother him now when his knee edges into the dark space underneath.

“Jon never told you because he didn’t think you would believe him. I helped him make this so he would know how to protect himself, if he ever found himself in danger like that again.”

Gerry flips to the very back of the notebook. The message he’d written is still there. He angles it towards her so she can read it and watches her face register the grim sincerity in his parting wish. It was never the epilogue to an ordinary game of play pretend.

Miriam’s posture loosens. There is a strange enormity to the way she says, “I like to think I would have believed you.”

Gerry sets the book on the ground. “Me, too. I just don’t know what it would have done.”

Silence falls. Gerry shuts his eyes and listens to Miriam trying to soothe herself. Her deliberate breaths echo like waterwind.

“Can you tell me something about him?”

The question is a murmur. The misty sound of sea hush fades into the return of passive house noises. Gerry opens his eyes to find her fiddling with her amber ring.

“He worked at the Natural History Museum last year,” she says.

“Naturally,” Gerry smiles. “Did he give you that from the gift shop?”

“When he was twelve. I gave him money to find something for himself, and he came back with this. To thank me for bringing him.” For a moment, her sorrow is as clear as her love.

There is a mason jar on a high shelf in the bookcase full of chipped seashells and beach glass. Gerry had left it alone. The Polaroid of the collection in the envelope had been enough of a reminder.

Before Gerry can ask if Jon had always scrambled to make up for his own presence, if he ever realized he didn’t need to, Miriam stands up. Gerry watches her cross over to the dresser and dig something out from behind a large box, gathering a cord in her hands before she scans the wall for an outlet.

“He chose one of these when I brought him back in,” she explains as she sets a planetarium projector down on the ground, as far as the cord will stretch. “They’re more expensive in museum gift shops. He tried to pretend he didn’t want it, but I saw the way he looked at it. This is the replacement I got him for his birthday after the first one finally wore out.”

Miriam flicks off the light switch by the door. Gerry can just barely track the outline of her silhouette in the dark as she walks carefully back into the center of the room. The floor creaks like a ship as she moves.

With the press of a button, the room erupts into a glittering nebula. Particles of whiteblue spin along the walls and ceiling as prismatic clouds of changing colours roll across them in auroras. Gerry has to hold his breath to keep from losing it again. When Miriam lowers herself down onto the floor beside him, they exhale in tenuous unison.

“I can’t tell if I wish he’d brought it with him to university.” She tips her head back against the mattress. “Sometimes I wonder if he left it here for me.”

Gerry withholds a snort. “Wouldn’t doubt it.”

Already, it seems to be calming her down. Stars dance across her face as her eyes trace the ceiling. It wouldn’t surprise Gerry to know that Jon had at least pieced that much together about her, if not everything else.

“Does he know about your thing for the ocean?” he asks. “Sort of got the impression you didn’t like it so much back then. Struck me as odd, considering.”

“Considering that I’ve lived in _Bournemouth_ for the better part of fifty years?” Miriam hums. “We did have a misunderstanding about that, yes.”

“How?”

A heavy sigh. “I don’t swim. That’s all.”

So, not all. “You cleared it up, though?”

Miriam’s mouth twists. “Eventually. But the damage was done.”

Gerry lifts his hand to tilt it against the churning shadows and lights. There is a halting moment before she speaks again to the ceiling.

“It’s my fault he’s so distant.”

Given her mark, it would make sense. It isn’t for Gerry to speak on, but he’s still curious.

“Does he ever answer when you call?”

“Sometimes,” she says. “Not often enough for me to feel like I’m not just harrying him.”

“So, you just call less and less.”

He catches her nod in the sparkledark. “He visits over holidays, usually. He was here for both this last Hanukkah _and_ Purim, which might have been a nice change of pace were it not for the fact that he was incredibly depressed.”

Gerry frowns. “What?”

“He fell and hurt his leg over the summer,” she explains. “That was actually the last time he called me himself, before he called to say he’d quit at the museum because of it. He’d forgotten precisely _which_ anesthetic medication he was allergic to, and needed to know before surgery.”

Easy to forget a detail like that when your memory is full of holes. Gerry isn’t sure how he’d managed to communicate anything useful himself this week, or filled out all those hospital forms. He doesn’t know who remembered all the answers, because it certainly wasn’t him.

Miriam twists her ring around her finger, a streak of petal pink from the projector crossing her face. “He wouldn’t let me bring him home right away, but by the fall he was a bit desperate to get out of London for a while. Living alone was harder on him than he’d bargained for.”

Gerry doesn’t know what to do with the dull, protective instinct that turns up in his chest. Alone in London all that time, and suffering. If Gerry had known, could he have done anything for him?

“It took him out of a theatre production,” Miriam continues. “He hadn’t invited me to come see it, but I could see it broke his heart. His spirit, a little, too, I think.”

“I found some old playbills before,” Gerry says. “Was he on stage, or in the crew?”

“I don’t know if he’ll ever try again, but he preferred the stage.” There is the thinnest hint of a smile in her voice. “He’s quite good.”

Gerry nods against the mattress. He smooths down the static cling of his hair to the blanket by his head.

“But you did get to see him perform?”

“Once or twice, when he was in uni. The last he invited me to see was _Hamlet.”_ Miriam sits up a bit. Motes of moving light catch in her eyes. “I still have the video. It’s downstairs.”

Gerry glances back at the planetarium projector, the book by his knees on the floor. His legs hurt again, his shoulder digging wrong into the bed frame. He twists when he sits himself up straighter, his spine letting off a fusillade of firecracker pops.

“It’s probably about time I try walking around some,” he says, and she laughs.

“I’d imagine you’re quite tired of sleeping, yes.”

Slowly, Miriam shifts onto her knees, reaching for the bed frame with both hands to pull herself up. Gerry would offer his arm for her to brace against if he knew she wouldn’t wave him away. By the time it takes her to rise to her feet, Gerry manages to do the same.

He takes the stairs slowly, and she waits no more than three steps ahead of him at a time. As they pass her study, she opens the door and gestures for him to look inside.

On the wall to the left of her desk is a massive, antique navigation star map that Jon had gifted to her after he first got his job at the museum. There is a small collection of nautical chart books and atlases on a narrow table in the hall, held firmly together by a set of polished agate bookends. On the centermost floating shelf in the foyer is an intricate ship in a bottle.

For the first time, Gerry studies the framed photos on the walls as he passes through. 

The boy at the bar mitzvah is a little easier to recognize than the one in the graduation cap. Neither of them look like the person sulking in black off to the far side of the stage when Act I, Scene II begins. That person wears a low ponytail tied at the nape of his neck with a ribbon, loose waves curling just above his shoulder blades. The sullen downturn of his face is somehow less grievous than the tight smiles in the pictures where his hair stops around his ears.

It’s two lines into his first soliloquy that a flash of green fabric straps itself across Gerry’s memory like a blindfold.

An upsurge of unnatural clarity winds itself in loops around the pins that hold him down in the shadowbox of his mind like thread art. It comes in split-second spliceframes and half-forgotten fragments until the image completes itself.

No faces. Mostly hands, clay brown and undamaged and insistent. In the fluorescent lights of a convenience store, in the harsh half-shadow of a crowded tube, bruising his forearm with grief. The gift of peppermint stick, lukewarm water, an empty palm in search of symmetry.

Sometimes eyes. Helpless in the doorway, begging him to stay. Boring into his back as he ran for his life through Dublin square. He hadn’t needed to see them to feel their scrutiny, only now, he can name its source.

Just once, a voice. He hadn’t spoken on the train. Only before the snow, when he had waited and been kind and left Gerry in shallow want of a kiss that hurts to feel all over again.

That old winter shame is springtime new. The shock of summer makes more sense with Miriam’s stories of shambling legs and broken spirits. There is a plastic bottle cap with a duck scraped into it safety pinned to his rucksack with all his other buttons and crow instinct keepsakes. The soliloquy is still mid-recitation when Miriam’s voice scores through the static.

“Gerry, what’s wrong? Are you having another—?”

“No.” The word rushes out of him in a gasp. He can’t pin it on the Vast, or whatever sickness he’s still nursing. The headache in his eyes now is from the only mark that he’d ever gone out of his way to ask for. “No, I’m— fine.”

“You tensed up,” she says. She’s sitting forward on the couch, studying his face. The lines around her eyes are tight with worry. “What is it?”

“Nothing, just—” He knuckles at one of his eyes, the other still open and stuck on the television. Jon is gripping his head in his hands and asking, half-bowed, _“Heaven and earth! Must I remember?”_

It took a mere second for the flood of realization to erode the last dredges of red paint from his skull and bleach the inside with understanding. What feels left behind is the pink foam of old blood and room to figure out the rest.

He should draft a list. Miriam’s are comprised of fact and action, but all Gerry has are questions that build off of one he had asked himself earlier: if he had known, could he have done anything?

How did he not notice? If he had looked up at his face, would he have recognized the black in his eyes? Would they have actually spoken? Could Jon have stood any stronger against his Loneliness had Gerry left him something more tangible than the memory of pressure to tide him over? A real anchor that he could keep with him? A friend who knew his name?

If he had known it was Jon from the beginning, would Gerry have known who to introduce himself as? What kind of wall would he have taken down if he had tried?

Would it have even made a difference? 

Jon existed as a blindspot, and he had put Gerry in a box. Both of them have been navigating in the dark.

_“But break, my heart;”_ Jon says lowly from the stage, _“for I must hold my tongue.”_

Gerry has learned the hard way that secrets do not promise safety. The truths that fall from his mouth are more freeing than every lie he’s ever told himself. He’s always felt better being known.

It’s his absolute certainty that he’s pulled two strikes from the same match that makes him dizzy. That he’s somehow fallen a little in love with the same stranger twice.

Gerry has always believed in the human capacity for everyday love. He lets himself collect little anchors on purpose, in the absence of trusting that stronger ones could survive him. He’s done it before, with all sorts of different people for astoundingly miniscule reasons. The words don’t change now that he can picture Jon’s face. All he hadn’t known was how much it would ache once he could.

Gerry doesn’t have to explain that to Miriam. The bare bones of the truth don’t hurt as deep as the dark marrow. He can keep that much for himself.

“I was just putting some things together.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **CWs: some medical talk; a few fucked up descriptions of monsters; mild body horror (for a monster and an old scar)**
> 
> count the references to the dark and the stranger! could it be that they exist in the direct opposition to the beholding, which finally prevails at the end to diagnose gerry with shakespeare-induced gay thoughts? 🤔
> 
> speaking of the dark, [here is a reference to the monster under the bed and the handprint scar](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/795528665352896522/795551759794700328/somehands.png) by @archivistbottles!
> 
> and speaking of gay thoughts, [ remember when @kayleerowena drew jon as hamlet after chapter 9](https://kayleerowena.tumblr.com/post/615876506585071616/)? this may be a recovery fic, but the effects of seeing jon as hamlet are pretty much incurable. pour one out for gerry. (if you think this pining looks bad, though, just you _wait_ until it's mutual!)
> 
> and FINALLY, in case anyone hasn't seen it, [i wrote a post about vast!miriam a while ago](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/617608308665335808/)! 
> 
> catch me on tumblr @[gerrydelano](http://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/) as always!


	13. sink or swim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The starving sea was indiscriminate. In the end, Miriam was only seventeen. If the ocean wanted her, she was powerless to tell it _not today._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> art and references time!  
> \+ @boneroutes knocked it out of the park once again with [this gerry from last chapter!](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/618956856189239296/)  
> \+ and [here's a miriam i made on picrew!](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/619240647071825920/) includes young miriam - you're going to need that mental image. enjoy!
> 
>  **CWs in the end notes!** _please read them for this chapter especially._ the end notes are important in general this time, and not just because there's a small transcript of a little list gerry writes here, too (image located after "items.")
> 
> suggested listening: [drifting - plumb](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwRiBBqVWLQ)

_sink or swim - to fail or succeed entirely by one’s own efforts_

───── ☆ ─────

At breakfast, Miriam watches as Gerry pulls out a piece of paper. It’s an uneven square, folded in on itself so it could fit in his pocket until their drop scones and honey were no longer in focus.

“It’s sort of pathetic,” he sighs, dropping it onto the table in front of her. “I couldn’t think of much else beyond these.”

Miriam reaches to flip it around and smooth its deep creases. Gerry lowers his head onto his arms, still watching her through his lashes as she studies the page.

Gerry’s penmanship is a feeble twining of tremorlines. His margin drawings are stronger. A fairly detailed eye in the top corner — unsurprising. A sailboat, an anchor. A little duck floating in a puddle. The list is composed of only two items.

“Isn’t much,” Gerry murmurs into his sleeve. Miriam shakes her head.

“It’s a far cry from nothing at all,” she says. “This is enough for now.”

She had asked him to write this last night as they parted ways from the dinner table, and he’d made a wisping joke about homework assignments. Her justification was halted by a shrugging confession: he didn’t mind. In fact, he’d always wondered what it was like.

It’s a list of things he hopes to accomplish after he feels secure in his sobriety. What he imagines will come after the pain of the past week, beyond the healthcare aspect of his other new to-do lists. The fact that he could only think of two things to look forward to is nothing short of heartbreaking, but Miriam can’t say she’s all that surprised.

“Question,” she begins, instead of voicing that. “I suggested that you think of a few long term goals, _and_ short term goals. How would you classify these?”

Gerry regards the list with a twisted mouth. “I couldn’t decide. I guess the painting is short term, technically. It’s not like I’m _not allowed_ to paint, I just…”

His hands. Miriam already knows, even without the way he thumbs one of his splints. Gerry doesn’t waste time in reviving the faded sentence, soldiering through into a new one.

“Practiced some.” He nods to the paper, lifting his head a bit. “Easier to draw than write. Painting’s allowed to be sort of a mess anyway. Bet I could make a style out of it.”

Miriam exhales through a small smile. “Yes, hold onto your adaptability. A skill like that will only strengthen the talent you’ve always had.”

Gerry smiles at her. His head isn’t down quite so far as the first time she’d complimented his art, but he’s still bowed forward over the table. Miriam breezes past it.

“You could go to a craft store,” she suggests. “Spend a few hours, buy some brand new supplies. Start entirely fresh.”

He hums now, considering. “Barely remember what I’ve got left, yeah. I’d definitely need new acrylics. If they’re not sealed, they’re dead within months. Been way past that.”

“That’s perfect, then.” Miriam slides the list back to him, tapping it with her nail. “Jot that down. Add whatever else you think you might need, too, when you think them up.”

Gerry pulls a mechanical pencil out from his pullover pocket and scribbles in a third item onto the list. He puts a star next to the number without prompting, and Miriam is almost inclined to smile. Good. He’s decided what to start with.

“What about this one, here?” she asks when he pushes the list back to her, pointing now to the first item. “Is that something you’ll do right away?”

His mouth twists to the other side. “Not sure. Don’t think it’s safe, with mum around.”

A bitterness rises in Miriam’s throat. “Quite frankly, I’m surprised you didn’t put _moving out_ anywhere on this list.”

Gerry shrugs. “If it were a possibility, I’d have done it long before now. Believe me.”

“It couldn’t be a long term goal?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know when I’ll get the chance.”

_If_ he’ll get the chance, he doesn’t say, but Miriam hears it and her heart grows teeth for a sharp moment. Gerry hadn’t told her much about his mother, but it hadn’t taken more than knowing him as a child for Miriam to entertain the occasional daydream of throwing the beast off a building.

Inappropriate to broadcast. It doesn’t always seem that it would even make him feel better. Miriam’s ire would serve as no key to his shackles. He doesn’t shy away when it shows on her face; only watches her quietly until she relaxes her jaw.

Gerry speaks of his mother with far more ease now than he ever did as a child. He doesn’t panic or pale, or lose his voice. Now he delivers truths with a conversational simplicity that makes Miriam’s blood run cold every time he lets something slip. 

_She turned on the light pretty fast,_ he’d said when explaining how the handprint on his leg hadn’t killed him. _‘Course, she was waiting for it to grab me._

The words exist, and he can say them now. He just averts his eyes. Miriam can’t tell if it’s because he’s ashamed to have been hurt so badly by his mother, or if he’s ashamed to still love her in spite of it.

Miriam corrects herself with a deep breath. It exists as a glacial stage in her chest, but that’s nothing new.

“I would say then that the first one is a long term goal, buying new supplies is short term, and painting again overall is more of an ongoing aspiration. Those are good to have, to keep you from stewing in stagnation in between everything else, or when you’ve finally crossed them all off. You’ll feel more productive with some sort of baseline.”

Gerry sits up, his slouch pronounced and unwanting. “Are you going to make me think of more?”

Miriam huffs. “I’d hope that you’ll constantly be adding things to this list. Whenever you come up with something you want, or wish you could have been doing all this time, you should write it down.”

His brow goes down. “I don’t know where to start, is the thing. Can I get an example?”

She hums, fingernails drumming on the counter. The Lioness of Brittany is nibbling at her bowl next to the refrigerator, the soft _crunch_ of her chewing resounding in the quiet room.

“Have you ever had a pet of your own?”

Gerry about barks a laugh. “No. That’s just— no, never.”

Miriam doesn’t want to know why that’s so lacking in possibility that he has to laugh. She rolls her shoulders against the stoneskip of her mind from conclusion to loathly conclusion. “Would you ever want one? Had you ever thought of it?”

A short silence as he considers. He turns to look over his shoulder at the Lioness. “Yeah. It’d be nice, maybe.”

“Alright, that’s a start.” Miriam drops her chin into her hand and watches the Lioness as she sits back from her bowl to smack her lips and yawn. “You get along so well with her. Would you want a cat? Or are you more of a dog person, do you know?”

She could see Gerry with a dog. They take so much work and attention; he might not be in a practical state to take care of one any time soon, but maybe one day, he could be. There’s something to be said about the healing properties of caring for an animal. Gerry could stand to be needed by something that won’t take advantage of his kindness the way people have. The more she thinks about it, the nicer it sounds.

Before she can daydream about potential breeds he might fancy, Gerry shrugs and says, “Always thought snakes were cool.”

A quick laugh escapes before she can catch it. “Oh, yes, of course.”

Gerry’s eyes shift back to her, narrowed and playful. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

All it takes is a knowing look for his stern mask to give way into a full smile. Miriam smiles back. Sometimes it takes conscious thought, but she knows that she has a very limited window of opportunity to ensure that Gerry knows what his company is worth. 

She should have smiled more at him when he was here the first time. She should have smiled more at Jon.

Not now. Not the time.

Miriam clears her throat, glancing to the list. “That could be another long term goal, perhaps. Owning a snake someday, when you’re in the right place for it.”

It would take financial independence and a safer place of living. It would take getting out, and getting on his feet all over again. All of the things he should have been able to ease into naturally. That his mother should have been preparing him for instead of withholding from him. Miriam can hardly fathom the challenge of starting over completely at his age. It had been hard enough for her to start over as a guardian after losing Sarika. Losing Isaiah.

Gerry isn’t going to be raising the child of one he’d outlived. Hopefully, he’ll just be raising a snake. The stakes will be infinitely lower, but just high enough to keep him motivated.

Miriam pushes the list back to Gerry so that he can add the fourth item himself, and takes it back when he’s finished. He still looks anxious, fidgeting with the clip of the mechanical pencil. She _does_ know why.

In the bottom right corner, opposite to the duck in the puddle, is an uncertain scrawl of _Call Jon?_ in a wobbling oval. Miriam is more than certain that this is what he’s been waiting for her to comment on. In the lull between fresh ideas, she has little choice but to finally confront it.

“Is there a reason you didn’t put this on the list itself?”

One of the studs in Gerry’s lip wiggles around as he bothers it with his tongue. “Not sure where it fits in.”

“This reads like a draft as it is,” she points out. “They’re not separated by order of likelihood, or accessibility. I’d imagine one day you’ll revise it on a fresh paper, too.”

She knows how she needs her own lists to be, but Gerry doesn’t appear to need the same things. She can tolerate the itch it puts under her skin. If it’s going to help him, it needs to be tailored to his own specifications.

For all that he must have been wanting to talk about this, he doesn’t have a suitable explanation. “You said yourself, it’s no good over the phone. I don’t want to scare him.”

“I could still ask him to come down here,” Miriam suggests. “Do you think it might be easier with me as a buffer?”

Gerry shakes his head too fast; she can see the spin it puts in his eyes.

“No, definitely not.” He pinches the bridge of his nose with some amount of force. “I still feel… I don’t know. Not ready. And it’s sort of pointless to have him come all the way down here if I’m just heading back to London anyway.”

With every reminder of his impending departure, Miriam feels herself dragged backwards in time. No matter how many times it’s come up, she is never quite able to ward off the cold shock of refusal that springs up in her gut. The instinct to grab a hold of Gerry and say, _No. No, I am not letting you go back to that place._

A weight had lifted itself off of Miriam’s chest when Sunday came and went, and he was still here. A pattern had been avoided. History was not repeating itself loss for loss. Something could change.

The price, of course, had been learning. She knows now that the way his eyes slip out of focus and his mouth falls slack around stillborn words are not simple bouts of dizziness but absence seizures, and she had watched him have far too many before he had one in front of a doctor. She knows now that she may never know what it is that ails him beyond her suspicions, because they had been told he would need far more testing to determine what was going on and they needed to focus on his withdrawals first. She knows that by the time Gerry achieves any sort of news or result, he’ll have slipped from her grasp again. Slipped from hers and into some monster’s, no better or worse than the one she had released him to the first time.

And he’s so _calm_ about it. His resignation is no easier to witness than it was when he seemed to look right through her and into a future where there would still be no exit. Preparing himself, almost, for this future right here; where he has numbed himself so deeply to the extent of his suffering that he finds it more comfortable to return to it than stay away.

Miriam can’t stand it. She isn’t confident that he’ll even remember to go to the doctor. He hadn’t remembered being taken in for an MRI scan until a nurse teased him for falling asleep in the machine. Miriam had watched him play along with an uncomfortable half-laugh, had watched his face fall when the nurse turned her back. She had asked him about it the next day, and watched him search for the memory as if by hand. Then she watched him lie again, and swirl a cracker in a bowl of broth until it dissolved. He was telling the truth in his inability to.

Gerry is watching her now. Even saying nothing, there is a question in his eyes and Miriam isn’t sure how to answer it. No, she’s not alright. No, she cannot tell him so.

Instead, she pushes forward. “Speaking of London, you still have that list of referrals so that you can find a GP?”

“Mhm,” he nods. “Everything’s in that folder we put together. Safe in my bag.”

“Good. Today, I’ll give you something else to put in there. I’ve been putting it together since Monday, I think it’ll help you to keep on top of your medical schedule.”

Now he raises his eyebrows. “What, you’ve been coming up with a game plan, or something?”

Miriam meets his eyes. “I want you to be very careful not to lose it.”

He blinks. His piercing wiggles around again. “That’s a lot, Miriam. You didn’t have to do that.”

Every time. She does her best not to sigh. “All I ask is that you use every tool I give you to its fullest extent, and to the best of your ability. It’s not as if I booked appointments for you. It’s just a guideline in writing, so that you don’t forget what’s already been explained. Honestly, it should be common practice for the damn doctors to do that themselves. _I’d_ have forgotten most of it had I not been taking notes.”

And not everyone is like her. It was a miracle she’d managed to get Jon into the habit. It’s a bit late to instill the same one in Gerry, especially given that it’s hard to take notes on an exam table.

“You’re certain you have no one that can go with you?” she asks. “Not a _single_ friend?”

The look on his face is so tranquil that it makes her want to scream. “Nobody I’d bother with this. Sort of wrong to walk up to your tattoo artist and say, _‘hey, Abby, I know I ask you to stick me with needles on a semi-reg for fun, but I am_ dead _terrified of the super big ones. Come hold my hand while I get one shoved into my brain? I’ll buy lunch after, if you still respect me. Also, if I don’t end up lobotomized.’”_

Miriam’s wince flattens. “There is no way they could lobotomize you with a biopsy.”

“I can dream.”

She rolls her eyes at him, no qualms about it. He can take it about as well as he dishes out, which Miriam has learned is actually ‘quite easily, once he’s comfortable.’ Oddly comforting, in a way. The jest carries no tension or disrespect. 

Gerry sobers after a moment. “The worst part is that I know she’d say yes. I just don’t want to do that to her.”

Miriam can’t begin to guess exactly how familiar he is with his tattoo artist, but from the few stories he’s told about her, she’s a sweet girl. Respectful of his boundaries, and caring. For Gerry to be so certain that Abby would say _yes_ to such a weighty request tells Miriam that her care for him is clear enough that even he can’t write himself off as any old client anymore.

“I would suggest you keep her in mind anyway,” Miriam says. “That isn’t the worst part.”

She won’t say that the worst part, to her, is that Jon would almost certainly help him, if he knew. The worst part is not that Abby would say yes, but that Gerry is so reluctant to even give her the chance. The worst part is that Miriam would be more than happy to commute up to London every now and again to accompany him herself — it’s not as if she has much better to do, retired and living alone as she has been — but he’s already told her no.

She doesn’t have to tell him. He already knows.

“I’ve been planning to go in for another session soon as it is. Want to get my spine done by the end of the year.” As if to accentuate this, he twists in his chair to let off a round of still-concerning pops before settling his elbows down again. “Can show off the shiny new sobriety while I’m at it.”

His smile is lopsided and his eyes are sad, like he’s grieving the loss of it in advance. Miriam frowns at him.

“You should,” she says firmly. “She’ll be very proud of you, I’m sure.”

“Yeah,” he wisps. “Sure.”

The words are little more than sea spray. His head dips forward and down just enough for his hair to spill over his shoulders. Miriam leans onto her elbows. “What’s the matter?”

His questioning hum is soft. He flinches as the Lioness of Brittany jumps up onto the chair next to him, but he’s quick to curl his arm over her when she climbs up onto the table. Miriam purses her lips.

“You just got quiet, is all. I think you should put this on the list.”

“Saddling my innocent tattoo artist with the grim burden of knowing too much about my rapidly deteriorating flesh prison?”

“Spending some time with a friend. Something tells me that she would enjoy your company without the incentive of being paid for a service.” Miriam sits back with a shrug. “I don’t think you need the excuse of getting a new tattoo every time you want to see her.”

Gerry sputters a bit against the _thwap_ of the Lioness’ tail over his mouth, pushing it down from his face with one hand. “But I _like_ the tattoos.”

“Be that as it may,” Miriam sighs. “You know what I mean. Don’t deflect.”

“I’m not deflecting. What do you have against tattoos?” He raises a hand with an aborted snap of his fingers. “Wait, right. Isn’t that a Jewish thing?”

She sniffs, crossing her arms. “To some.”

Gerry sits up, eyes bright. “No way.”

Sometimes, smiling takes conscious thought. Other times, it takes conscious thought in order to refrain. “I can’t say I’m the biggest fan of yours, though.”

“Nope.” Gerry shakes his head, just short of wagging a finger at her. “Not fair. You can’t judge mine unless you fess up about yours. Even the playing field, Miriam. What is it?”

“My lips are sealed.”

_“Where_ is it?”

“Back to the point,” Miriam says, spinning the list towards him again. “I would call that another ongoing aspiration. Spending time with Abby, that is. Write it down.”

Gerry scrunches up his face at her in a decidedly childish gesture of disappointment. When the Lioness whacks him with her tail again, Miriam can no longer fight off her smile. He smooths down the offending fluff one more time before finally nudging the cat away from him so that he can reach for the paper. She meows in protest of the rejection, walking straight into Miriam’s open hands.

Gerry frowns at the list after making his addition, cheek in hand and letting out a long breath. “Don’t have much for the short term aside from the craft store, and my tattoos.”

Miriam takes a moment to think. “Are there any books you’ve been meaning to read?”

He laughs again, covering his eyes when the sound becomes more of a groan. Never a comforting reaction, as lovely as his laugh is when it’s coltish and untroubled.

“What?”

“Just— it’s funny. Every innocuous suggestion has a mountain of weird, supernatural baggage, no matter what.” Gerry’s shoulders bounce with soft, jolting breaths, his hand dropping to reveal the gentle smile in full as he shakes his head down at the list. “Not your fault. Just makes it hard to think I can ever just get out.”

Not her fault. Miriam stares into the Lioness’ fur and ruminates on that for a moment. 

Not her fault.

She could argue, but he may return the favour. The book that was her fault didn’t induct Gerry into the life he’s been living. It only brought him here, and brought him back. Miriam wishes that were enough to kill her regret.

What would be his fate had he never come here at all? How much time had she been able to buy him that he might not have had without that first experience? Perhaps without Gerry’s help, Miriam might have been too late to save Jon from his nightmare of a primary school; it always felt too late as it was, but would she have ever known had that eerie, haunting child not told her what Jon could not?

Miriam doesn’t want to think of a world where the two of them never met.

She used to wish it, almost. On the days that Jon carried that book around with him everywhere, reread it like no other book she had ever given him. On the nights he slept with his lights on and woke her up shrieking from a nightmare that he couldn’t explain, but that only began after that awful weekend that she could never lift from her bones.

She can’t think about it now. It’ll come later, again, as it had last night. It’ll haunt her until she gets a hold of Jon. Until she sees him again. Until she tells him how sorry she is, properly. She’s said it before, certainly, but with new truths come new responsibilities. With new understanding, perhaps it will finally mean something to him.

All of it traced back to her. To her dismissive raiding of charity book bins. To her desperation to keep Jon rooted to the spot, safe in their house, where she wouldn’t lose sight of him. To her attempts at protection becoming not only a trap but a challenge. Of course he would teach himself to pick the locks. Of course he would leave the minute he was able to. Of course she needs to tell him she understands now. That she should have before, because she had done the same thing once.

Miriam could argue that it isn’t her fault, but she shouldn’t. She can tend to that all later. Gerry needs her focus now.

“Not that I ever could,” Gerry continues. “I don’t even want to. Feel it’s sort of important you know that I’m not asking you to save me from something.”

Miriam bites her lip. “Why wouldn’t you want to get out? It’s horrible, Gerry, it— What good could there possibly be in a life like that?”

His face is so clear when he looks up at her. “If it’s me, it might not have to be someone else. I help people, sometimes. I like doing that.”

“So, what, you’ll just run around rescuing people from _monsters_ here and there, and that’ll be that?”

Gerry laughs again. “It’s not always monsters, Miriam. Mostly, it’s just… things. Things I can destroy, so they’re no one’s problem anymore. I’m not running into open jaws all the time. I know I’m not built for that, I’m not completely stupid.”

“But it happens anyway,” she insists. “They find you anyway, and you get hurt.”

“I make it work.” 

“That can’t be it for you, Gerry.” Desperation curls her voice like a wood shaving. “What about _you?”_

“It’s too late for me,” he shrugs. “And I don’t say that to sound fatalistic. I mean I really _can’t_ just go back and… undo my whole life, and start over without the scary bits.”

“Well, of course not,” Miriam says. “But what if you _did_ get away from your mother, and all the things she puts you through? You could go to school, or find a job that you love. You could travel somewhere and paint the landscapes, a-and—”

She cuts herself off when Gerry shakes his head. His mouth is still lifted faintly at the corners. Miriam tries not to wonder when he became responsible for soothing himself like that. It does nothing to soothe her.

If Gerry were a once-happy child who had the smile beaten out of him as he grew, that would be its own heartbreak, but he is not. It is not hanging by a thread like a loose tooth and wobbling forth by sheer force of will to prove that he’s still got fight left in him; it was beaten into him backwards. Crying out had lost its meaning for him early. He’d somehow given up on those instincts even before the first time Miriam told him she couldn’t keep him.

His stormless face cracks in her mind’s sky like a signal flare, but his conviction makes Miriam wonder if _she’s_ the one seeing this all wrong. Isn’t acceptance the grail of the grief cycle? Shouldn’t she be proud of him for making it there?

It’s what Gerry seems to want from her. He’s been waiting patiently for her to gather herself. Miriam nods stiffly, asserting her composure. The Lioness has come to sprawl out on the table. Gerry reaches an arm forward to smooth his hand over her belly, his head pillowed on his own shoulder.

“Every time I try to run off, the same thing always happens. It stops being about leaving and more about looking for things nobody else knows to look for, and handling it on my own terms. I look for it everywhere. I feel worse when I _don’t_ see it, even just out the corner of my eye.” His curled knuckles peer up at Miriam through the Lioness’ fur, silverbanded and staring. “I don’t seem to fit anywhere but the in-between.”

Miriam swallows something that hurts. “There’s no way you could be alright with that.”

“I am, though.” There are no traces of untruth on his face. “I’ve had time to be alright with it. Of course I don’t want to be in my current _situation,_ no, but I’d rather know what’s going on than be completely clueless. It’s just what I know. I can’t unknow it. I’d rather at least use that knowing for some good, you know?”

“No,” Miriam shakes her head. “I don’t understand how you can live that way willingly. It doesn’t weigh out to me.”

Gerry tips his head back to smile again, close-lipped and uncomplicated. “That’s how I feel about your world.”

Then comes another small wave of understanding. Miriam’s brow sinks.

“And that’s even after I’ve seen some of yours.”

Gerry nods. Of course he can’t talk like this with people who haven’t seen it. Of course that limits him. Even this conversation must be like pulling teeth to him, like explaining the colour of the sky to an anglerfish.

“I’ll be alright,” Gerry says, sitting himself up to stretch. “It’ll be that much easier, too, what with my brain a little de-addled.” He drops his arms with a sigh, only reaching back up to pull his hair over one shoulder. “Got you to thank for that.”

Miriam waves her hand. The Lioness perks her head up at the loss of contact at her back, flipping over in protest before Miriam can coax her back down. Finicky thing.

“You have yourself to thank.”

“Don’t do that.” Gerry leans forward on his elbows again. “You don’t have to lay it on so thick, I get it already. Takes guts to get sober and stay there, et cetera. I get that it hinges on me. But I wouldn’t be trying to do it if not for you. Even if it doesn’t last, I have to thank you for… believing that it could.”

She shakes her head. “Don’t thank me for believing in you.”

“You know what I mean, Miriam. Stubborn.” He breathes another laugh, steeped in a disarming fondness that makes her miss Isaiah. “You _have_ gone out of your way.”

Her lips draw together to pinch, eyes cast to the knob of a drawer to her left. Hypocrisy, then, on her part. Miriam knows she’d gone out of her way, yes. She knows why, and she knows that Gerry knows, too. He seems to know everything, for all of his time spent leashed and lashed and lonely.

“Well, whoever is responsible, what matters is that you keep making progress.” 

The Lioness has managed, somehow, to get on top of the list that had been left between them. Miriam nudges her until she rolls onto her feet, poking at her hind leg until she lifts it off the paper. She glances over the list again, all of his recent additions. It looks fuller now, but could use another item to make up for the one still left in the bottom corner.

“I think it was smart to keep this simple. I still think you can add more, particularly in the short term. You do know that just means ‘something you can achieve in a year or less,’ right? It doesn’t mean ‘something you can achieve by tomorrow?’”

“Is that what it means?” Gerry’s brow does something funny, and Miriam can’t quite tell if he’s joking. She passes the paper back to him and watches him study it. “Huh.”

Miriam crosses her arms, squeezing the space above where her elbows bend. “Even if you can’t completely disengage, there are surely little things you can still have fun with. Nice things you can do for yourself, every now and again. One nice thing to just... make you feel better.”

The piercing wiggles again. It’s always the one on the right.

“How long does it take to change your name?” The question is hesitant and plain in equal parts. His focus lingers on the list, high on the page. “I’ve looked into it before, I just... can’t really remember, right this second.”

“Your first name?”

“Nah. I like having a nickname handy.” One of his eyes winks closed on a quick wince. “Second’s just got a bad taste. Always liked my dad’s better.”

Miriam presses none. “By deed poll, it should only take a few weeks. Once you have the proper documents, and the fee. I have a friend whose daughter said it was relatively painless.”

Gerry nods, a little hum in his mouth. He reaches for the pencil all on his own.

───── ☆ ─────

When she knocks on his door in the morning, there is no mumbling answer. When she peeks inside to see if he’s still asleep, the bed is empty. His rucksack is gone from the floor.

For a long moment, Miriam can do nothing but linger in the doorway. The jamb catches her shoulder when she sways against it. Lights all off. Planetarium projector back on the dresser. The glow-in-the-dark star decals that she had helped him stick onto the wall the night before last have been taken down and placed back in their box, sitting half-open in its old spot in the bookcase. Rolling chair pushed in at the desk. The Lioness’ quilt is nowhere to be seen.

It comes as no surprise. She can understand, on a fundamental level, why it might be difficult for him to say goodbye. Claws of pain don’t dig themselves into her heart until she scans the room in search of a note, and comes up short.

After breakfast, Gerry’s focus took a turn. Miriam watched him glancing anxiously out the windows when he thought she wasn’t looking, checking the lock on the front door. When she finally asked him what was wrong, he simply said, _I’ve been gone too long. Usually, she finds me by now, if I’m still in the country._

_She’s welcome to try,_ had been the answer. _She’ll have to go through me._

Any weight the promise possessed swiftly died by the flash of naked fear in his eyes.

_Miriam, please,_ he’d whispered. _She’d tear you apart._

There is no note on the table, either. Miriam grasps the granite edge and sets her jaw. Deep breath. She’d seen it coming. 

The Lioness of Brittany calls out for attention as she sits up from her place on the couch. Slowly, Miriam turns to drift towards her, reaching out a hand to cradle her delicate face; folded and pinned underneath her is the quilt. Rhetoricals bubble in her throat, a croon of _he at least said goodbye to you, then?_ but her voice is still asleep somewhere low in her chest. Lost in the empty inside and around her, alone again in this quiet house.

She doesn’t have the time to sit down before there is a knock at the door. The clawclutch of loss doesn’t loosen its grip on her heart but rather tightens in reflexive, hopeful terror. Had Gerry forgotten something? Is it his mother, come to deliver retribution? Is it the postman, in all his removed mundanity? Miriam doesn’t check the window before she opens the door. A flat expression in greeting would befit all three of them. 

Held in Gerry’s hand is a cluster of carnations, the same shade of pink as the sheepish apology dusted across his cheekbones. He’d spent a long time in the shower after supper and had knocked on her study door to say goodnight clean-shaven, his jumper loose around his shoulders and his hair gentled back from his face. It’s tucked neatly behind both of his ears now, the sunlight of the early morning nesting warmly in the growing roots of soft, mousy brown.

“Sorry,” he says first. “Probably scared you.”

“You did,” Miriam confirms. Relief had quickly washed over her at the sight of him, but terror is still buzzing in the roots of her teeth as it retreats. “Why would you do that?”

He shrugs, lifting the flowers. “How lame would it have been if I’d asked you to drive me to a florist? Here.”

The carnations are unevenly cut and not wrapped in any paper, plastic or twine. Miriam takes them from him when he holds them out to her, skimming her fingers over the petals with a frown.

“The nearest florist is on the other side of town,” she states. Gerry looks down again, his mouth pinched with suppression. Miriam’s shoulders drop in disbelief. “Gerry, tell me you didn’t.”

There’s a spark of mischief in his eyes when he glances back up. “It was a pretty big garden. Don’t think they’ll miss two or three.”

_“Gerry.”_ A smile shakes the name unstern. “Someone’s garden? Really?”

“I panicked,” he laughs. “The florist was too far.”

Miriam shakes her head. His laugh is contagious when it’s this simple. “You didn’t have to get me _flowers_ in the first place.”

Gerry shrugs. “It works in the movies.”

“And this is real life,” Miriam says. “No need for the dramatic doorstep farewell. Come inside, I’ll fix breakfast.”

When she steps back into the house, Gerry stays rooted. She looks over her shoulder and pauses. He adjusts his hands on the strap of his bag, slanting with its weight. With a clear voice, he says, “I really have to go.”

The carnation stems are cold and heavy in her hand. Gerry lets her stare at him for a long moment without protest, waits for her to face him fully. His mellow has waned into solemnity. She takes a slow breath.

“If the florist was too far, then you’ll never make it to the railway station. Let me put these somewhere, and I’ll drive you.”

The sway to his stance tells Miriam that he won’t just cut and run in the time it takes her to move into the kitchen. Gerry had cut the stems long enough that the blossoms don’t sink past the rim of a tall glass. He waits for her at the door, and doesn’t wave away the banana she passes to him on the way outside. She believes him when he says he’s saving it for the train.

“You’re going right back home, then?” she asks in the car.

Gerry shrugs against the passenger door. “Probably not. Doing laundry bought me some time. I can probably bounce around for a few more days and throw her off a bit before I have to go back.”

It’s all so absurd. It’s like a terrible thriller film, or a nonsensical dream. Miriam has no choice but to accept it and try to speak his language.

“Right,” she concedes. “Because if she managed to tail you to the coast and you head up all of a sudden, she’ll have to start over.”

“Yep. She’s still got to track me down manually most of the time. It’s sort of funny, honestly.”

No it isn’t. Miriam keeps her eyes on the road.

After a moment, Gerry sinks in his seat. “I cut it close this time. Going to the doctor, staying in one place for so long.”

Miriam flexes her fingers around the steering wheel. “Do you think she’ll turn up around here even after you’ve gone?”

“I hope not.” She catches him wince again out of the corner of her eye. “G-d, no, it’s stupid. I should just go straight back. I mean, I’d left _right_ after she faded, and she’s always gone a few days so she might not have gotten far looking. She usually gives me a few days head start once she notices I’m gone anyway, so if I just go back then it’s a false alarm. I think the timeline matches up enough...”

Miriam doesn’t understand more than half of what he’s muttering to himself, but she doesn’t think that he’ll explain it if she asks him to. Better to ask a different question when he falls into quiet concentration.

“If you’ve already gone, what reason would she even have to harm me?”

“To eliminate you from my list of places to go.” It’s been a long time, it feels like, since his voice has taken on that edge. Not since the agitation of withdrawals had made him squirm and snap and scowl before he fought it back down out of respect. Miriam squares her jaw.

“If I needed to, I’m _sure_ that I could—”

“I’m not joking.” An efflux of severity darkens his voice into a lower key. “I really admire your guts, Miriam, but you couldn’t take her. The raw power of being pissed off on my behalf isn’t going to cut it. Don’t.”

“I wasn’t going to—” Miriam lifts a hand from the wheel to pinch the bridge of her nose. “I just don’t like the idea of you putting yourself back in harm’s way just to keep her off my doorstep.”

A lapse of silence softens him again. He curls against the door. “Can we not talk about this? I’m sorry, I just— It’s inevitable, alright? So let _me_ protect _you,_ and do what I have to do.”

“Alright,” Miriam says. “Alright.”

The street in front of the railway station’s entrance is bustling with morning commuters and taxis in a line. Miriam walks with him to the edge of the awning. Gerry stops to tilt his head at her, squinting in the sun streaked across his face. She stands in his dim shadow, wondering desperately where all of her words have gone.

He reaches out for her first. Miriam accepts his hand upon her shoulder, lets him pull her carefully to his chest. Her fingers slip on the leather of his long jacket when she tries to anchor her hands at his back. He’s a misty mirage in her arms, so difficult to hold onto.

A brief eternity of quiet darkness settles in Miriam’s mind when she closes her eyes. Deep water, black and endless and timelocked. If only a moment could be bottled; she wants this one the way that Gerry wants it to end.

The weight of him against her is water not yet so deep. He can’t wade any further, and she can’t ask him to.

If he can feel the tectonic shudder of her ribs, he says nothing. His tremble like a tidepool. There will always be a gulf between them.

It’s over too soon.

Miriam recovers herself with a sharp breath in, a slow one out. Gerry indulges her as she adjusts the collar of his jacket with a tug, patting imaginary dust off his shoulders. When there is no more for her to pretend to put right, he holds still as she frames either side of his face with both palms. When she cannot hold eye contact anymore, she turns her focus to his ear as she tucks a loose strand of his hair more securely behind it.

“There,” she says. “You look leagues more alive than you did last week, you know. More awake.”

Gerry’s responding smile is a little weaker, but still present. “Long way to go, still.”

“You’ll make it.” Miriam pats his chest one more time, and finally withdraws her hands. “And if all else fails, you always have my phone number.”

Gerry breathes another laugh, the smile more alive in his eyes now than on his mouth. “I do have that.”

“And you’ve got everything else? The folder, with _all_ the papers you need?”

He nods. “Yep. Went through them about six times.”

“Water bottles?”

Nod. “Fit three in the bag, plus the plastic one we bought. Thanks again, for that.”

“Did you take anything else?” she asks. “I told you that you could keep those little glow-in-the-dark things.”

Now he shakes his head. “No, I think the star stuff should stay in your house. Nicked a few other things from Jon’s room, though. Couple pencils. Think he’ll care much?”

Miriam scoffs. “No more than the neighbours will miss a few stolen flowers.”

“I don’t know,” he says. “They’re quality pencils. Don’t tell him it was me.”

It’s intoned as a joke, but Miriam’s heart sinks nonetheless. “Of course.”

The commotion of the growing crowd is gull chatter all around them. Gerry wavers where he stands, but doesn’t move yet towards the door. He should sit down somewhere soon. She should let him go. Miriam reaches to dust off his sleeve one last time.

“I won’t wait to see which train you take. I trust you to do what you believe is right.”

“Thanks,” Gerry says, and for a wiredrawn moment, there is nothing else to add.

It’s after she’s turned her back to start walking towards her car that he catches her elbow again from behind, calling her name and asking her to hold on.

Miriam watches the medley of pendants hanging over his breastbone as he sifts through the charms with faint scrutiny before selecting one to pull over his head. He pools the chain in his palm and pours it into hers when she reaches out to take it.

“I know you’re going to call him.” Gerry looks down at the necklace as she draws it up into the light. “If you ever get around to telling him about me, you can give him this.”

It’s a peculiar thing, but amidst the stranger ones that Gerry is still wearing, Miriam can appreciate its comparative simplicity and elegance. A silver dragon’s claw clutched around a crystal ball, bruise-purple and glinting in the daylight. Certainly nothing Jon would buy on his own. Certainly nothing he’ll let go of.

“Does it mean anything to you?” she asks. “Any sort of message I should pass along?”

Gerry makes a short sound, half-bitten and quick. His rucksack has sagged off his back and into the space under his elbow, his fingers twisting at a button pinned to the front pocket.

“Nothing special. Just something of mine I’d like him to have, if it’s safe.”

“It will be,” Miriam promises. “I won’t tell him anything until he’s prepared.”

“Good.” Gerry nods. His eyes linger on a spot on the pavement for a while before he does it again, as if something had come to a neat conclusion in his head. “Good. Alright.”

“Alright,” she repeats, and Gerry steps back and away from her. 

Miriam watches as he stops to hold the door open for a family, their hands full with wheeling luggage, and casts a final look over his shoulder. 

She lifts her hand like a flag for him to find through the meandering crowd, feeling for all the world as though the space between them is stretching impossibly further despite her inability to move backwards. She fights the dizzy siren song of grief long enough to catch him waving back at her before someone else has taken his place in the doorway, and he has drifted once again beyond her reach.

* * *

The sky sang in pale grey since the early morning, a clear sign of the sea’s hunger for rain. Its want for more and more, and to fill its vacant density with whatever it could collapse around in breakers. 

Miriam knew this of the water long before she started lifeguarding. Fleeing to the coast would protect them no more than being landlocked, in a shelter underground, on a farm in the countryside. The natural world was every bit as deadly as the people who ravaged it with fire and war. She didn’t want her first proper rescue to be someone she feared losing. Not when she’d worked so hard to find them in the wreckage.

An overcast sky was, to her new family, an invitation. Miriam could afford to be a bit cavalier; since moving to the seaside, she’s scarcely left the water but to go home with Ruth to sleep. But it would have been so easy for them to get separated. To drift away without her knowing. Since she could not convince them out of going, she went along to keep them safe.

Their beach bags had sat spread out in the wide floor space between the two side-facing benches in the back end of Ira’s spartan Land Rover. Ruth took up a whole bench for herself, her head tipped back against the open rear to let her hair hang over the edge. Miriam sat with her legs slung across Simmy’s lap on the one they shared, whinging the whole way about the weather.

“You volunteered to come,” Simmy reminded her, pinching just underneath the blue swallow inked into her thigh. Miriam bent her knee into his ribs.

“Because you’ll drown without me there with you.”

Laughter from the driver’s seat. “That why you brought your whistle?”

Miriam bristled and clutched the whistle against her chest. “I thought we would at least be going to the public side of the beach.”

“It’s sweet, Ira, leave her.” Ruth giggled, sliding forward to kick the back of his seat. She tossed Miriam a wink. Like when they were children, it was enough to calm her.

“It’ll at least catch your attention if you’ve gone out too far.”

“Last I checked, you’re the youngest one here,” Desmond said. “And the smallest. Who put you in charge of saving everyone?”

“My instructor,” Miriam defended. “Just because your arm is still attached to your body doesn’t mean you can swim worth a damn when the weather goes south.”

“It’s only a bit grey.” Desmond swiveled to hang his elbows over the center seat in the front; his left forearm was gnarled by combat. “No match for our grand hero, Miss May. Three weeks out of training’s enough, innit?”

“Shut it, Des.” Simmy flipped his cousin the bird. “She’s as good as a proper lifeguard as you were a soldier at sixteen. See if she rescues you when you need her.”

“Sod off, Simmy.” Miriam crossed her arms. “Insult me like that, why you.”

He clutched his heart and pleaded, “Oh, Miss May, I’m sorry! Will you still save me if I go under?”

Miriam turned her nose up at him, pointedly avoiding Ruth’s grin. “I’ll consider it.”

“Good enough for me.”

Miriam laughed. She was a good swimmer; the best in her class. 

The sky was hardly dark enough to fear lightning. The waves were just strong enough to be playful, to knock them around some without threat of drowning. Were anything to happen, it would likely be the result of collective stupidity than nature’s wrath.

She had just pulled Ruth from a laughing heap in the foam and shoved her bodily into Desmond and Ira’s waiting arms, chiding her all the way. Simmy reached out with a towel to walk Miriam back up to the shore when she staggered in another swell, her wet hands slipping from his grasp as she was pulled backwards and away from him.

The sand fell away beneath her hands and knees as she failed to crawl, eversinking and impermanent. Every time she managed to lift her mouth above the foam for a gasping breath, a new wave dashed against her spine to force her down again. The voices calling her name were stifled by the roar of water crashing down over her head, fading little by little. 

Panic felt trite. A disservice to her training, like it had all been for nothing. If she couldn’t keep her head, how could she save anyone else from this? Even pinned underwater, stale breath burning in her lungs, it wasn’t the experience of _drowning_ that Miriam feared.

The starving sea was indiscriminate. In the end, Miriam was only seventeen. If the ocean wanted her, she was powerless to tell it _not today_.

It would have been like eating dust. She would have been a singular mote inhaled amidst an infinite cloud of the same, lost where the sea lashes the world’s every coastline. Dropped into the deep off the side of boats no one even knew were out there. How many had left port without saying goodbye to anyone? How many ships lie at the very bottom? How many bodies skeletonized into playgrounds for tiny life unknown to them before drinking their deaths? Would she be found before she became one, too?

Her mind was full of bleached bones when she resurfaced in deeper water. Lifeguard training could not immunize her to being dragged out to sea, no, but it had at least taught her how to wait. Not to panic. To keep her head above water, and to breathe. It was about conservation of energy. It was about remaining calm, storm or no storm.

She stayed calm until she looked ahead for the shore. She stayed calm until she twisted in the water to check for its outline behind her, and saw nothing but the undulant surface of the water for miles. The beach was gone; the rocky cliffs were gone; the colourful thumbprints of clustered houses circling the other side of the bay were gone. All that peaked above the flat expanse were the white caps of waves.

Those, too, faded into nihility. Miriam’s head bobbed over the membranous surface of the sea, settled still and quiet under her chin. She reached for the whistle around her neck only to find that it had been pulled from the cord. 

She didn't know when it happened. All that mattered was that it didn't matter; no one would hear her without it. She was too far from any shore for a scream to carry. 

How long had she been dragged? Certainly not long enough to justify the disappearance of all surrounding land. Certainly not long enough for the mounting waves to have ironed out like taut silk, pinned down at corners too far away for her to see. Open ocean was never so still.

Even the swish of her arms and legs amounted to nothing that lasted. It didn’t feel like treading _water._ But she wasn’t trapped — glued in, cemented, none of that. Miriam lifted her hands over the surface to see if she _could,_ if she could disturb it at all. She splashed and flung droplets from her fingertips to make some kind of visible change.

Her presence made no mark. The space taken up by her body did not obscure the expanse. No ripple she created became another, or remained.

That was the nature of a ripple, wasn’t it? A temporary wavelet, destined to lose momentum and peter. Any breeze that created one would dissipate. A dropped stone would sink.

The ability to swim wouldn’t save her if she couldn’t get back to shore. It would only embitter her every muscle with exhaustion. Wasn’t that what the ocean loves the most? Wasn’t that her name?

Her mind swept itself into insensate blankness. She knew the undercurrent of panic was there, low and rushing like a whirlpool in the very back of her mind, but she struggled to feel it.

Only in total stillness did she finally feel anything at all. A sensation around her legs, an aching vibration burying into the soles of her feet. A leaden tremor shook the very marrow of the smallest bones in her body, risen from so deep below that she thought she might be standing on it.

Something was moving underneath her, shadowless in its enormity. Gliding, sweeping, slow. It cast no shape up through the water that she could see. 

Searching for its edges twisted her vision like a knife. The blackness behind her eyelids swam with pain even when she shut them in surrender. An instinctive repentance formed prayers in her mouth, taking the shape of the _Al Chet_ before she realized that this isn’t where Ruth had taught her to put it.

That thing was no G-d. It certainly wasn’t hers. Still, the regret following the burst of pain in her head came second to a need to apologize to it for daring to try and comprehend it. 

It couldn’t be in her imagination. It wouldn’t fit there.

She turned her head up to the sky when she could open her eyes again, desperate for a passing bird, or the sun. Some proof that time hadn’t just stopped entirely, and forgotten to freeze her along with everything else.

None met her. There were no doves with olive branches. No sun. No current to fight or submit to. No reason to tread any longer. No reason to think that the thing underneath her even knew she was there.

She kicked herself up into a float. It was the only thing she had ever been taught that she had left. Her own way of solidifying the lesson resounded in her head in whispers, the phrasing she had crafted to keep it anchored in her memory.

_Be still. Become a part of the sea until it forgets that you don’t belong there, and wait._

Wait for what? Who was waiting for her on the shore? Had the shore ever existed? 

There was only that presence underneath her, and it wouldn’t harm her. She wasn’t enough to want. If it had a mouth at all, it was too far away to snap her up. Even if it were to turn around and try, she would be dead long before it reached her. It crept along at a glacier’s pace; Miriam wondered how much time had to have passed in order for her to register that.

The sky was all one colour. No clouds, or all clouds? Which was it? What colour _was_ it? Was it grey, or white? No blue. What was the difference? Was there a difference?

How her eyes could lose focus when there was nothing to focus on made no sense, but they did so with a dullsharp bayonet between the brows. The pain of it rumbled back through the fibrous tethers rooted to the base of her skull like thunder. She shut her eyes like steel doors, as if that could keep them in their sockets.

In forfeiting sight, she could hear it. With her ears submerged, it made sense. Almost.

The sound came distantly, from wherever light first sparked in the furthest reaches of space. It came from too close, existing purely inside the confines of her own body. It came from the very core of the earth, in mutiny against the shallow grave of molten secret.

No word she came up with seemed to fit. It wasn’t whalesong, because the thing underneath her was no whale. It couldn’t be a heartbeat because she had dropped her own into the water long ago. Familiarity was beyond her reach. It was no sound she’d ever lain awake to.

Not bullet rain shelling down like glass against the Stygian watertop. Not bombsmoke hissing, the twig-snap crack of dying embers in a busy city’s broken heart. Not a stretch of white noise but every individual pop of static that had ever taken up a split second of sound-space in an empty room through the radio, gathered into a single drum-crushing blast. A bone breaking. A blue morning split by jet fire. A scream.

It was none of that, and all at once. Every sound she had ever heard, echo chambered back to her with the force of a cosmic collision. With the gentleness of being kissed.

It was everything in its absolute silence. Something told her that it had not _started_ at any particular moment in time. She knew implicitly that it would never stop.

The surface of the water trembled where it wreathed her face, like a drum skin struck from beneath. It didn’t surprise her anymore. It was that presence below; there was no space where it did not occupy. In the wake of it, she was little more than drifting plankton. An organelle. Less.

The water was so warm. She couldn’t feel where her limbs ended and where the water began any easier than she could see them in the black of it.

She could not even call herself an atom; an atom was so infinite. The scar of their breaking carved something into the world. The anger and hurt she had felt over _atoms_ had been burning inside her since the moments they split open, since she was a child on a farm hearing news from afar about the damage even her saviors had done. An adolescence of fire and grief felt soaked numb in the tepid water. Her heart might have broken at the loss, could she feel it.

Become a part of the sea until it forgets you don’t belong in it. Belong in it until you forget where you came from. Wasn’t that her name?

She’d had a name, once. A bitter name. A season. 

No need, now.

No need.

No. Wait.

That wasn’t right.

If there is anything she could never forget, it was the depth of her rage and sorrow over the backdrop to her childhood. The suffering of her people. So _many_ people, innumerable and lost in the haze of hunger and imprisonment and Alexandrian ash. The parents she never knew before a desperate neighbour placed her on a boat, in the arms of a teenage boy just barely old enough to be on his own, too. He lived on the farm with her until he was old enough to enlist, and disappear.

She remembered the disappearances. She remembered disappearing. 

The losses piled up to engulf her. The finer details of her mother’s face, her father’s family name, the equal halves of her heritage from each side. Her sense of safety and permanence were unwatered seeds, her language undone like a shoelace. So many of her house siblings, all faded into fates she couldn’t fathom. Her favorite cows as they aged. The baby swallows in the rafters of the barn when she learned to climb up without falling, to hide there with them, gone in the early autumn.

But the barn swallows came back when they were grown, and laid their own eggs in the same nests. She loved the goats and chickens, too. Not everyone she lived with trickled away. 

Ruth held her close in the bed they shared and made her promise not to forget either of their names, repeated them between whispered lessons of the prayers she remembered. Ruth watched over her with a hawk’s eye and a sister’s love, and tried not to cry in front of her when the letters from her father stopped coming. 

Ruth had to leave at seventeen, had moved to a city by the water to get a head start on making them a home while Miriam was still too young to leave the countryside. Ruth came back for her when she turned fourteen, after she had begged and sworn she could work in the city if she had to. Ruth had told her in all their letters in between that she would be better off on the farm for a while longer, that at least they had vegetables. 

What Miriam wanted was her sister. She wanted to see how much bigger the world was from the very edge of the open ocean. See if it was as comforting as she’d been told in stories.

Ira — a Jewish partisan — drove Ruth to the farm to get her, and they brought her to the small house they shared with Ira’s best friend, Desmond. There, Desmond’s young cousin had fixed what he could of a lunch with their rations, and gave Miriam an extra portion off his plate when she finished hers. He lived with his parents, technically, but spent more than enough of his time tagging along after Desmond that he might as well live with him, too.

“You can call me Simmy,” he had said. “My second name makes for a better first than _Stuart.”_

She debated how to introduce herself for a long time. In the end, she came to the decision to simply say what she knew.

Ruth still promised never to let her forget her name, even when they both lived under the ones given to them for protection. Even when Simmy and Desmond called her May. Even if she liked how it sounded sometimes. Simmy and Desmond called her May to keep her safe. 

May. Miss May. Miriam. _Meisje_.

Memory meant something. All of it — every name in the ashes, every face, every love before that losing. Every synagogue before it smouldered, every hand that laid their foundations. Every word out of every mouth in every corner of a world that had been changing before she came into it and would only continue to do so, because — it _meant something._

A still ocean wouldn’t rob her of that. Even if it robbed her of her life, she would not die uncaring. She would not die afraid of it. If this were to kill her, she would go angry.

She would go with grief and celebration and rage. She would go with names and prayers and the knowledge that someone on the shore would remember who she was, the way she still knew the outline of her mother’s gaunt face. The boy who held her on the boat. The barn swallows’ rafter routine, and the way she felt the soft ache of their leaving. The sweet joy in their return. 

If she went, it would not be quietly. The horrid thing underneath her didn’t have to hear her humming; it was the _yai lai lai lai_ that G-d accepts in the absence of rote, in a mouth wired shut with inability. She could hear Ruth singing in her head. She could feel her heart swell with waves of need and love and sorrow. She would not forget that. She would not go numb.

The antithesis to apathy was passion. 

A needle of ice cold struck her cheek. 

She opened her eyes to a grey sky, clouds churning with the growing darkness of their last held breath. A single raindrop had gasped itself free and found her, somehow. The sound of her name filled the air with colours, her eyes throbbing with what felt like disuse. The water rocked with ceaseless motion. She straightened to tread, and looked ahead to the expanse of dry land in front of her. The beach; the rocky cliffs; the colourful thumbprints of clustered houses.

“Miriam!”

Ira’s voice. Strong fingers latched onto her elbow, almost alarming in their solidity. Miriam had to push her hair from her face in order to see him. When had her braid fallen out? That, at least, didn’t matter. She let Ira pull her towards the shore, and hale her up out of the tide.

The moment that she was standing on her own, Simmy careened into her at full force to pepper her face with kisses in between his fretting.

“I thought I’d lost you,” he gasped. “You just slipped right through my fingers.”

Miriam stood still for it, clutching her towel around her. “How long was I out there?”

“Long enough to scare _him_ half to death.” Desmond nearly laughed. “You ragdolled for ages. Some lifeguard _you_ are.”

They asked her why she didn’t fight back, and she didn’t have an answer for them. She didn’t have an answer for herself. On the drive home, she curled up in Ruth’s arms while Simmy watched her from the opposite bench. She didn’t meet his anxious eyes, instead keeping hers on the patches of sand trailing up his legs. She hadn’t brushed hers off yet, either. They itched with sticky, clinging phantom current. With _why bother?_

She shouldn’t have expected it to make sense. It didn’t take long to understand that she would never understand, and neither would they. Neither would anyone who hadn’t been out there, or who had been right beside her. She didn’t know how to make other people care. How to make them see.

She would have to find a way to explain to her instructor why she needed a new whistle.

───── ☆ ─────

Gerry told her that her humming had filled the house. Had reached him upstairs, crept through the cotton of his pillow and woke him up as often as it had lulled him to sleep. 

She hadn’t needed to tell him of what she heard in the water all those years ago, and how she had silenced it. He knew by looking. He knew by closing his eyes.

Miriam wonders now if she can do that again. If she can do it for herself, now that there is no one else. Now that she has bid her train station farewell to a shell-shocked young boy boarding to turn back up in a ravaged war zone, so unlike any she had once known. So very much alive with danger, and pain.

It was a longer goodbye than she’d gotten from her son, from her husband, from even Jon. Jon makes enough sense; it isn’t permanent. At least, it was never meant to be. Then again, that’s what all the _kinder_ had been told.

All but those like her, perhaps, orphaned from the start. She had not been told any such thing; not that she would have remembered it, if she had.

She has not told Jon enough. Jon is the first person she should tell.

He was so hollow when he was last here. He’d told her of what he’d lost, yes, but Miriam didn’t know how to fill that gap for him. She has never known how to tend to someone’s else’s grief when so much of her own life’s definition hinged upon who or what she would lose next. She has simply taught herself to expect it.

She couldn’t save Isaiah, or Sarika. She couldn’t keep Jon’s knee from snapping out of place, or his dissertation’s due date from outrunning his new limp. She hadn’t seen his schoolyard suffering when he most needed to be seen. He hadn’t told the rabbi.

All of it, he harboured. None of it he shared. Not beyond the basic mechanics of what she could see when she looked at him, or when he tells her he’s moving cities. He cannot be blamed for what he has learned directly from her.

Had she ever told him that her name was May? Had she ever told him what it meant?

She needs to call him. She needs to say she’s sorry before it’s too late. She needs to ask him to come home for Pesach.

Miriam has about seventy years of kvetching to catch up on, and a lifetime of secrets to tell him. She knows he has more to unbottle, too; that is precisely her worry.

So she is here again, stalling on making a phone call that in its necessity will hurt someone fragile.

How could she have gone through with it the first time?

Ruth had told her why. Miriam called her that Saturday night, when both boys were asleep after their day at the beach, and told her everything. From the minute she laid eyes on the child to the future she foresaw for him. How hot the coal bed of failure burned as she walked barefoot from end to end, dragging him behind her.

_It isn’t the same,_ Ruth told her. _Times are so different, Miriam. The world has changed so much._

_It isn’t that I wish we were at war,_ Miriam said. _It’s that I wish I could be who rescued us. I can’t remember how it worked._

_You’ve offered your refuge,_ said her sister. _Don’t be ashamed you can’t do the work of thousands._

_There should be more than just me who want to try._

The dragon claw and crystal ball sits heavy and cool in her palm. For a moment, Miriam wonders if there’s some sort of magical property to it. Would it protect Jon somehow, were he to wear it? Would it change anything for him?

She knows it will, once he sees it. Once he knows. 

Miriam remembers the concept of the teenager who held her on the boat more than she remembers _him._ The older she got, the more she changed, the more difficult it was to imagine who he could have been. The harder it was to remember his name. For so long, he has only been the sweet-faced boy who ruffled her hair on his way out the door, told her to take care of the cat in the barn, and never returned.

She can’t let Gerry become Jon’s vanishing soldier.

To be frank, she hates her mobile phone. All she knows is that if she holds down the _3,_ it dials him. Perhaps she presses a little too hard.

No answer. She holds her breath until the voicemail tone sounds off like a knell.

“Jon,” she says, and she hates the drowning sound of her voice. “I know this is out of the blue, but I need you t— I need to see you, I have something I need to tell you. Something important to give you. Please, call me back as soon as you find the time.”

Unrehearsed. Not enough. 

“I love you,” she adds. “I love you very much. Also, the Lioness misses you.” Another pause. “Talk soon.”

She sets the phone facedown on the cushion beside her. After a moment of staring hard at its back, she flips it over.

Miriam doesn’t want to give up. She doesn’t want to burden Jon the way he thinks he’s burdened her, but she regrets sending him out on a basket into the river. She hadn’t considered the price of wanting him to grow up safer, on higher ground. Watching him grow up from the distance, the further and further he drifted from her—

It was something neither of them could get back. She needs to say _something._ It doesn’t seem that he wants to hear it.

The Lioness of Brittany pads over to rub against her leg, a chirrup in her throat. Miriam bends down to heft her up onto her knees, pulling her to her chest like a pillow. Unbothered, the cat purrs, her paws paddling thin air before she finds a shoulder to knead. Miriam shuts her eyes to sink back against the couch. She rolls the pendant in her fingers, and waits.

The phone rings with a strong vibration. His picture brightens the screen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **CWs: discussion of WWII (miriam was 2-8 years old in that time period, and as such will factor in that experience when thinking about her life on a large scale); loss and grieving; existentialism**
> 
> TRANSCRIPT OF GERRY'S LIST:  
>  _"- Find dad's family  
>  \- Start painting again"_
> 
> i did a _lot_ of digging, fact-checking, and ran this by a few sensitivity readers just to be ABSOLUTELY positive i'm portraying this in the right way. i hope it made a lot of things that were already in place make that much more sense. this story is ultimately about recovery from deep trauma left largely unspoken and unshared, and how important it is to break that silence. it's important for you. it's important for those you love. you don't have to love from a distance.
> 
> that all being said:  
> ♦ **[here are some ways to help protestors if you can't protest yourself.](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/619850549489270784/) includes a list of bail funds you can donate to, literature to read, and all sorts of other great resources.  
> ♦ [here are some videos you can stream if you don't have the money to donate.](https://boyplural.tumblr.com/post/620087741228695552) (AD BLOCKER OFF; DON'T LOOP; FOLLOW THE DIRECTIONS)  
> ♦ [here is my current events tag,](https://boyplural.tumblr.com/tagged/world) i'm constantly filling it.**
> 
> if you have time to read my writing, you have time to look through these and contribute. be safe, take care of each other, never stop fighting for what's right.
> 
> you can reach me on tumblr @[gerrydelano](http://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/) as always.


	14. as the crow flies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In all his puzzling, the only solution to that sort of thing that Jon has ever come up with is incidental intervention. Someone else stumbling onto the scene, a random happenstance of old experience overlapping new. Being in the right place at the right time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> all i can even say is "don't kill me." 
> 
> **CWs in the end notes** , and more transcriptions (two images: one after "dark room." and one after "shaking hands.")
> 
> triple suggested listening:  
> \+ for pain: [wax & wane - alana henderson](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wm7hh4qkuhY) (first verse miriam, second verse gerry, third verse jon!)  
> \+ for soft tender ache: [billy & anne - the altogether](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlwjOV0zONg)  
> \+ for optimism and love: [orpheus - sara bareilles](https://youtu.be/LWMBG1Z0FuE)

_as the crow flies - the shortest distance between two points_

───── ☆ ─────

There is a cinderblock in his pocket. It cost eight pounds twenty-three and it may kill him by weight of shame alone before he reaches the end of the plank. Every meandering turn he makes down hallways and between bookshelves is only delaying his immersion into utter failure.

It’s only a pack of cigarettes. Its objective insignificance will be precisely what drowns him. Its deceptive lightness, the ease in the scripted purchase. He hadn’t even stuttered the request to the cashier. It was almost like he hadn’t quit at all, and had only run out yesterday.

_“That killed your grandfather at forty-six,”_ dadima had hissed when she caught onto his habit. Jon had rolled his eyes, then, and told her, _“Well, I’ve got plenty of time before that poses an issue.”_

What he’d meant was, _I don’t care._ She’d seen it on his face, and he told himself he didn’t care about that, either. It was hard to care at twenty, when the nicotine at least aided with the stress of university. At twenty-two when he needed something to numb him out of focusing on his knee, when he needed an excuse to leave rooms he didn’t want to be in. 

It was hard to really care until twenty-five, when he’d stepped outside for a moment’s relief before returning to dadima’s bedside. Astoundingly indelicate in hindsight, but perhaps for the best. It might never have come up had she not smelled it on him.

_“That killed your grandfather,”_ she pleaded, laboured by recrudescing pneumonia, and trailed off in search of the number. The wheeze that came instead dragged the air from Jon’s lungs, too. They’d winced in synchrony. It had never been so clear where he had learned to shroud his own sickness in shame.

_“At forty-six,”_ Jon completed for her. _“I know. I’ll stop.”_

The box is so heavy. It weighs his gait like a lump of peridotite, dense and whispering devilishly, _unearth me. Set me on fire._

He’d bought it on his way to work. Impulse, mostly, but not the heated sort. Jon doesn’t quite remember what he’d been feeling when he slipped into the corner store and made a beeline for the counter. He thinks he’d been drifting, looking back.

It’s been well over two years since he’s ridden the current of those instincts. It should have been harder to be tempted back. 

Not that he’s got many other coping mechanisms up his sleeve for situations like this, though. He’s never had to arrange a cremation before, let alone one for a cat. Had never even owned one until he’d been bequeathed custody of the Lioness of Brittany.

Jon supposes that he must have found himself believing she’d just live forever. It slipped his mind, sometimes, that she was already six when dadima had adopted her to fill his absence. For her to have reached fourteen was a small miracle.

At any rate, it’s been dealt with. It’s over, and Jon has little left but ashes.

Is that really cause to make more?

He could read instead. He has so much work to do. His job won’t wait for him to grieve, much less grieve a pet. What person here would understand if he told them?

His desk partner might. Jon still finds himself reluctant to broach the subject with him, though. Just because he’s let Tim steal a few kisses over the past year or so doesn’t mean that he owes him details about his personal life.

And what if they’re the wrong details? What if he never kisses him again? Oversensitivity is unattractive. Besides, it’s not the sort of game they’ve been playing. Jon quite likes their banter the way it is. It’s safe in its illusion of distance. Like hell he’ll threaten that over a cat, regardless of the trail of dominos that her passing knocked over in his head.

He’d spent so much time back in Bournemouth after that last Pesach. Dadima had taken the train up to see him so many times after he quit at the museum and secured his job at the Institute. They had spent so many nights talking until sunrise, like they had _never_ talked before, and she told him stories. Stories from the war, and of the ocean. About his father growing up, and how much of him Jon had inherited. About the very week before, and all she’d learned.

It isn’t that they had never been able to laugh together, or that he knew exactly _nothing_ about her life, but the moment she had first let herself shed tears in front of him is one that Jon cannot undo from his memory even as she had to manually haul pieces of it back into place for him. Even when she placed a notebook and a dragon crystal in his hands and told him that if she could go back and believe him when he still remembered the story, she would.

It feels almost wrong to admit that the last year of dadima’s life had been the one he’d felt closest to her. He hadn’t known she would take ill in the winter when he first realized it, of course, and so logically he knows it isn’t just a remorse response. Some last-gasp effort to feel like a good grandchild. Not ungrateful, resentful and unkind, so eager to leave her.

He misses her now more than he ever has. And really, he missed her even when he lived in her house.

Ugh. Tim would smell the smoke on him when he gets back. That’ll invite its own questions, its own judgments, its own disgust. Maybe _that’ll_ be the end of things. Maybe that’s enough to convince him that he shouldn’t.

He shouldn’t. He should just read. Easy enough, in a library. 

Or it would be, if he could focus. Scanning the shelves for something that at least somewhat pertains to his current caseload is harder than Jon would like it to be. His eyes slip off the spines before the words register in his head, connect back to their latest assignments and experiments. What is it they’ve been working on? Something with bugs, again.

Jon can’t say he’s overly fond of those cases. Even when they’re completely benign, they still come back around to _there are simply far too many bugs in my place of living. Oh, dear Lord. Help._

Jon would think that calling an exterminator would come first to reporting that unnerving overflow to a research organisation. At least that would either eliminate the bugs or eliminate the possibility that they’re _normal,_ in which case, fine, yes, come report it here. If they’re not out for revenge once you’ve ordered a hit on them, that is, because, well.

Well, it’s not like reporting them here will make them _leave._ All it really does is make someone aware of the situation. It’s not as if they have evil-insect-fighting countermeasures in place, or a team of _esoteric bug destroyers_ on standby for this such occasion.

And even if they did — _even_ if they did, there’s no telling what good it would do. If an encounter of that origin _were_ real, the chances that the statement giver would have even been given the _chance_ to go so far as to report the experience was realistically slim to none, so it stands to reason that a great majority of the reports they work through are hoaxes and mistakes. And in the event that it wasn’t, and someone _did_ manage, then their days would surely be numbered thereafter. As such, the point is moot.

In all his puzzling, the only solution to that sort of thing that Jon has ever come up with is incidental intervention. Someone else stumbling onto the scene, a random happenstance of old experience overlapping new. Being in the right place at the right time.

Jon tears a book from the shelf in front of him without checking the cover and heads towards the exit. He knows quite well that he was nowhere near the entomology section of the library. Only while checking it out from the front desk does he realize that he’d grabbed a copy of _The Mirror of Alchimy,_ translated in 1597.

If nothing else, it should keep him distracted for a time. It’s hardly a hundred pages, and certainly contrived. Even just processing the lexicon used should be something of a challenge. There don’t seem to be any paragraph breaks. Absolutely torturous. Fantastic.

Jon strikes a deal with himself. If he can’t get absorbed in it by the time he reaches his preferred courtyard, he’ll put it aside for a cigarette. A doomed endeavour, yes, but that’s the point of self-sabotage. He doesn’t care. And there’s still the chance that he’ll find himself magically immersed in the text beyond all expectation. He’s been surprised before.

Son of a bitch.

And now he’s angry. He stops by the door to the library, teeth clenched and tongue pressed so hard to the roof of his mouth that it goes sore. Dammit. Dammit.

He doesn’t have a free hand to clutch at the pendant hidden under his shirt in some private show of dramatic remembrance. He’s got his cane in his right hand and this wretched, dull book in the other. It would be stupid to readjust for the sake of sentiment. Jon isn’t entirely sure that ‘sentiment’ was ever the right word to begin with.

His messenger bag is heavy as it bounces against the back of his leg with every revived step. Not quite so heavy as the cigarettes in his pocket, but the principle is the same. Jon blames the spiral notebook kept inside it, tucked behind folders and sheets of loose paper and ultimately buried in the present. 

He doesn’t know when he last took it out and flipped through it. It would be far easier to lose himself in than _The Mirror of Alchimy,_ but it would do very little to keep his mind from things that have tempted him back towards smoking long before the Lioness’ passing. The last thing he can say he’s still angry at dadima for, despite knowing by now that every choice she ever made was born out of love.

It just happens that she loved Gerry, too. Of course she wouldn’t disclose his second name when he’d asked her not to.

It was a matter of privacy. It would have been wrong of her to just turn around and throw Gerry under the bus after promising to give him time — all she had ever been able to give him was time in the tiniest of doses, and she would not take that away from him over Jon’s impatience. Gerry deserved better than that, after everything he’d been through. He had goals, and she believed that he would reach out when he was ready. Jon remembers the gentle pat on the back of his hand when she said, _“It was for you, too.”_

Jon swears that he gets it. Respects it. He tells himself whenever the frustration starts growing claws again that he _understands,_ and that it’s just something he’ll have to live with.

He _knows_ that, realistically, he wouldn’t have wanted Gerry to witness the unravel. Beyond the humiliation, it would have been unfair to subject him to that kind of turmoil. If dadima’s account of his character was true, then Gerry would have found a way to claim responsibility for all of it. As if he’d killed Thomas Tate himself. As if he’d ever set foot into that school.

Objectively, Jon knows they were entirely right to keep him out of the loop. Irrationally, still, it aches.

He can’t say he even remembers the onslaught. All the doors opening at once, every shade of brackish misery flooding out and soaking through the paper floor of his memory. The structure hadn’t been so fragile in its original state but rather had been split down the centre at some point, beyond his notice. Slowly, over time, it had shortened the space and squared off into compartments. Only occasionally could he see the shadow puppetry of moving shapes on the other side. When the light caught right. When he was half-awake, or felt almost safe enough to wonder if he was missing something.

There had been no replicating that division. The paper shielding had darkened and dissolved into unsalvageable slush. Once the initial hysteria finally passed, Jon decided that even if reassemblage were an option, he didn’t want it.

How could he have let so much of himself fade into obscurity? People he’d known? Things he’d seen with his own eyes, just — shut away? Just like that?

Some people might beg for that ignorance back. Jon can’t imagine.

All he has now is the aftermath of discovering his own history well after the fact. Things he always knew that he’d _known,_ but had shed the sensation of. The shocks of what _had_ to be memory that marshal his muscles in moments of spontaneous panic, but that he always came just short of placing. Names and faces.

It infuriated him, at the start. By now it’s simmered down into a faint boil, easy to ignore when he gets into the swing of things at work, on the rare occasion that he finds himself properly invested in a case. When they hit a dead end that doesn’t last any longer than it takes to meet eyes with Tim across the table before the synchronous query of, _“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”_ Jon can ignore stale anger in the wake of that tiny surge of thrill that comes with the once-or-twice bending of minor laws. In knowing that at least someone will have his back if things go south.

He’s gotten better at ignoring it over the last two years than he thought he might. There isn’t as much reliable reading material out there on the topic of recovering repressed memories from the perspective of the subject as Jon might like there to be, but he’d found enough to come to terms with being kept up at night. It’s fairly normal to obsess over the gaps in one’s memory, to desperately scramble to fill them in. To fight tirelessly to prove that something _did_ happen, and beg other people for corroboration. To beg for the belief of unreliable witnesses, ones own self far from exempt.

It’s normal, and Jon has had his fill of it. He’s gotten better at ignoring the rage when he remembers the injustice of the loss, and the need for black holes. It had secured a backseat position to spiteful ambition far sooner than he’d thought to expect upon discovering the truth. That night, he’d felt stiff in his own bed. Like it had ceased being his and _he_ was the intruder.

Not a single word on the page in front of him looks like a real word, Anglo-Saxon spelling conventions notwithstanding. Situating himself against the stairwell wall, Jon flips back to the first page and start over. It takes a long moment of preparation before he can tuck it under his elbow and start his painstaking descent. _Damn_ this ancient building. Jon digs his elbow into the railing and fixes his eyes on the steps ahead, calculating the weight of all he carries.

His bag is starting to hurt his shoulder. His palm is sweating a bit around the handle of his cane. The box in his pocket is an iron cannonball, now, but almost nothing compared to the one chained around his neck.

Being given some trinket to wear hadn’t felt fair. Hadn’t felt enough. He couldn’t trace the purchase history of a necklace like this; it looks custom made, like it hadn’t been produced commercially. It looks like the sort of thing that would have been picked up at an art fair. There’s no way that Jon could track down the seller, or that they would remember who had bought this particular piece, or when. 

For all he knew, Gerry had bought it when he was a teenager and never took it off. He could have simply found it lying on the pavement somewhere and never managed to locate its true owner, and so decided it’d be harmless to keep it. Maybe he made it himself. He could have gotten it as a gift from someone else, and it was merely some hand-me-down that never held any sort of individualized significance beyond being the easiest thing to strip from his person and give to the old woman who had driven him to the train station after letting him spend the week in her _grandson’s bedroom—_

No amount of reasonable explanation had made Jon feel any less like an afterthought.

Dadima had told him all but one thing. All but the _one thing_ he needed.

It only took two or three arguments for Jon to accept that he would need to find it himself. Waiting around for his phone to ring had never felt like a satisfying course of action when there was no guarantee that it would ever ring at all. Not in a world like this. Not with a life like Gerry’s.

No, a life like Gerry’s _must_ leave traces. Some kind of thumbprint, treadmark, blood smear, _anything._ Some evidence of his involvement in — what? A supernatural ether that pretends to be ordinary and inhabitable? The dark underbelly of a neverending nightmare?

For dadima to be so unshakably convinced of its merit was more than enough to reinforce what Jon had dreaded most, even in moments when he didn’t know _why_ he was overwhelmed. What else was he supposed to do with incontrovertible proof of that reality? Where else could he go in the hopes of never forgetting again?

His dissertation had gone down like a lead balloon. There had come a point when his supervisors could no longer excuse his absences from meetings, and his depression had started looking less like an episode and more like a new routine. Work at the museum had become a blight on his chronic pain unlike it had ever been before he lost the will to push through it and get to the exhibits he loved the most, and without his MSc he would never be able to advance there. The daydream he’d entertained about just staying a docent and being happy with that had died pathetically. He would have needed to make a change eventually.

The math did itself. It was right under his nose, in London this entire time. Where else might he stand a chance of finding a person who fancies himself a ghost?

It isn’t the only reason Jon is here, of course. He’d gotten a hold of that book far before Gerry came into the picture. He would have followed it to the spider’s door regardless, and there is no telling what would have become of him then. Would that have been the end? Or would Thomas still have taken his place, and he’d have had to cope with the sight of his sacrifice alone?

There are forces at work here that Jon wants more than anything to understand. The hoaxes make it harder. The only reason he’s not gone entirely off his rocker, he thinks, is because he’s not the only one here in search of something.

Jon recognized the focus in Tim’s eyes from the start. The defensive hunch to his shoulders when he curled around a book he’d snuck into a restricted section of the library for, the way that he silently put his things down near Jon during his first week working here as if to say, _“I can see_ you’re _about as cuddly as a cactus. This’ll be relatively painless, then.”_

No icebreakers necessary, or desired. No trading of intimate traumatic experiences to establish camaraderie and trust. That came rather quickly, all on its own, as maintaining the act in private became less justifiable than putting on a show for the coworkers they thought might slow them down. Sasha never bought it for a second, but there are exceptions to every rule.

They were out drinking at Ernie’s when Jon confessed that there was a person he needed to find. Prompted by nothing in particular, aside perhaps comfort with Tim’s ankle wedged up next to his under the table and appreciation for Sasha’s sober acuity. The strange ache of needing, very suddenly, to be known and believed about something that kept him heavy. 

He didn’t have to offer up a horror story to sate that need. Gerry was the only thing he had left from the past that could exist in the future, if he made good time. If he had some help. Two birds, and all that.

Tim found it exciting, started rattling off mission titles like _Operation Loverboy_ and _Operation Get Back Here_ (expertly spouted as Jon tried to get up from the booth), both of which were vehemently rejected on the spot. Sasha had shrugged and said that she would be very flattered if someone put all that effort into trying to find her if she disappeared from their life. Tim informed her that if they hadn’t reconnected at the Institute after all they’d been through together in secondary school, he’d be searching high and low for her right about now; she changed his life too much to never wonder who she’d become.

When she said that she didn’t understand dismantling a career on behalf of one person, though, an uncomfortable silence spread across the table like a spilt drink. The irritated flick of Tim’s brow hadn’t caught Jon’s attention as quickly as Sasha’s visible wince. 

His stomach sank, and he reminded her that his museum docent days were always intended to be short-lived as it were. This has never just been about reconnecting with an old friend; it was about ensuring that friend was even _alive,_ and hadn’t just fallen off the face of the earth with no one to grieve his disappearance. It’s about keeping that from ever happening, if he can help it. He just doesn’t think anyone should be reduced down to an unsolved mystery.

The teasing had been bearable if only because they unanimously agreed to keep a sharp lookout for anything that might help him. A side project, off the record. _Operation Dawson,_ because a _Titanic_ reference was as close as Jon would allow Tim in terms of poking fun at him for wearing a tacky necklace hidden under his work shirts. 

The relief of _telling_ someone was so immense that Jon wasn’t sure whether to imagine it as a wave crashing down over him, or a lifetime’s worth of worry sloughing off his very bones.

His bones are so tired. It feels like he’s been walking forever by the time he catches the sunlight streaming through the open archway leading out into the courtyard with a quick glance over the top of this book he’s still failing to read. Sasha will probably devour it in an hour or two if he drops it on her desk in challenge. That alone makes Jon want to try harder to read it himself, but good _G-d,_ it’s nigh unintelligible. His mind is in too many places at once. 

The only thing he can process on the page is the title of a chapter: _“Of The Quality Of The Vessel And Furnace.”_

And then the only thing Jon can process is the feeling of things falling out of his hands. 

His eyes follow the book as it sails to the ground in front of him, shaken from his grip by a collision that comes second to a sharp spike of alarm seizing in his chest. His cane goes next, clattering to the cobbles where they stem from the linoleum at the gum line of the courtyard’s mouth. The shoulder strap of his bag slides painfully down his arm before he convinces himself out of bending his elbow to catch it. A better use of his reflexes is to hold his shoulder steady; he has enough practice falling and letting things fall to know when straining his joints is worth it. Typically, unless glass is involved, it never is.

Even without scrambling to catch the bag, the sudden loss of its weight disturbs his equilibrium enough that he almost goes down with it anyway. It’s pure luck that allows him to stagger into the archway to his other side and brace himself on the brick. A startled apology stumbles from the person he’d careened right into while rounding the corner, but the words themselves are lost on Jon as he mutters something decidedly unkind.

Their hand is gripping the brick, too, the rest of their body backed into the courtyard with the impact. Jon doesn’t care to peer around and study them, busy tracking down the loose items that had come sprawling out of the unbuckled front pocket of his bag when it fell. There are pens caught in the crevices between cobblestones, none too terribly far away but just divided enough to be inconvenient. A long-suffering sigh grinds itself past his teeth as he steels himself to bend for his cane, fallen just close enough to his side to grab first. It’s a pain, but it helps to balance between it and the archway as he lowers himself to his better knee. 

The shadow of the other person moves in his periphery as they shift to help. Jon pointedly focuses on scooping up as many things as he can before they have the chance to touch and inspect them. An old sleeve of hair elastics he hasn’t needed in years had slid out onto the stone, a miniature spool of floss from the last time he went to the dentist. The cheap, plastic calculator he’d gotten from some workshop seminar that he and Tim had sat in on for an investigation had fallen far enough away that the person standing should have reached it first. Jon still beats them to it with a long reach that nearly topples him over.

It’s not until he’s stuffing everything back into his bag to take inventory of it all that Jon realizes the person had only bent down to pick up one item, and hasn’t tried to hand it back to him yet. He can’t tell if he’s bitter that they’re not helping more, or that he even expected them to keep trying despite his efforts to make it harder for them.

Looking up, he sees that they’re holding _The Mirror of Alchimy_ at waist height and have gone entirely still. Jon might assume they’re transfixed by the cover if his skin weren’t suddenly crawling with the unmistakable feeling of eyes on him. 

He swallows a chill, humiliation sprouting up through the cover of frustration like grass through cracked cement. As adrenaline wanes, awareness waxes. He can’t bring himself to look up above their midline and meet the potential stare.

Instead, Jon clears his throat and slaps the flap of his bag down over the front pockets. The sun is bright and beating down; all the more of an excuse to keep his head down as he extends an arm up and out.

“Excuse me,” he prompts. “I _do_ need my book back.”

Very quickly, it’s back in his hand. Jon all but snatches it back to shove it into his bag, taking the time to fit it in between folders. Anything to stall a bit while he calculates how to stand without straining his leg too terribly, or stumble of his own accord. Anything to maintain his distance, even if it keeps him on the ground for a moment longer.

As he situates his cane upright and steadies his hold on it, though, he takes pause. There is a hand extended out to him now, palm up and offering. Jon takes note of only two things before he waves his own hand in dismissal: the fingerless gloves, and the gesture he doesn’t want.

“No,” he grouses, “I’ve got it, it’s fine.”

The next apology is a nauseous whisper as their shadow skirts past his other side, ducking back into the building behind him like a hummingbird. Finally.

Jon hauls himself up by his cane and a firm bracing on the archway, dragging his bag up with him. By the time he dusts himself off and steps outside to lean back against the bricks, the regret has thoroughly sunken its teeth in.

Son of a _bitch._

The only way that could have been more unpleasant is if he’d actively turned the air blue with expletives. There is no justification for the tone he’d taken, miserable morning be damned. The person had deserved just as much of an instinctive apology as they’d given him, and it should have ended before they deserved a second one. That was almost brutally unfair, it was— _woefully_ unwarranted.

When Jon summons the energy to turn back around and peer past the archway, the person is nowhere to be seen. 

Probably for the best. Chasing them down to apologize would feel excessive. Too embarrassing. He would just be making it worse, and should leave it be.

Yes, better to leave it be. Pretend it never happened, and start over. Still, though. He can’t quite shake the feeling that he should have looked closer.

The nearest wrought iron table is littered with crisp October leaves, the seat of his chosen chair cold through his trouser legs as he sits down to brush them away. He never takes the chair on the opposite side if he can help it, bothered by its wobbling leg. Even sitting across from it, he shudders at the discomfort of knowing it can’t be fixed.

For a long while, it’s simpler to just put his head down on his arms than it is to consider digging that book back out of his bag. He drops his face to the table, the braided metal pressed up against his forehead like the band of an icy circlet. The chill is grounding. It doesn’t warm under his breath.

Eventually, he’ll need to go back inside. If he’d brought more deliberate work out here, that might be one thing, but there’s only so long that he can stall and say he’d gone out for a quick smoke before settling down in the office.

No. Wait.

He shouldn’t smoke. Tim would smell it on him, and might never kiss him again. Dadima asked him to stop because it killed her husband. It wouldn’t bring the Lioness back, and it certainly won’t solve _Operation Dawson._ He has no _good_ reason to.

He should just read, but not _The Mirror of Alchimy._ There’s no way he’ll get through that today, let alone retain a word of it. 

When Jon withdraws the notebook from his bag, he flips directly to the last page at the back of it. The most honest part of everything aside from senseless scribbles is the note in the lower center of the page, written like a whisper in a dark room.

Jon doesn’t remember if he’d found that message the first time. He had to have known it was there, if he was so committed to memorizing every word they’d written down. He doesn’t remember how it made him feel, though. He doesn’t remember whether he hoped for the same thing, or if he’d always thought it was idealistic. Did he even know the meaning of that back then? Had he first learned resignation from Gerry that very weekend, or nebulously from dadima in the years before?

Only one thing is for certain: the message underneath it wasn’t there before. 

It digs into the page in hard-pressed lines of permanent marker, so fierce and apodictic that Jon can almost hear the phantom squeak of the felt tip dragging across the paper. It’s not the uncertain, hopeful scrawl of a frightened child but the commanding fervor of an adult, however lacking in dexterity. The very same conviction, only now untempered by youth and bolstered, perhaps, by shaking hands.

For all of the shame he nurses for smaller sins than disregard, Jon can’t find it in himself to feel guilty. He’s never given Gerry a reason to believe that he would ever obey the command to run, no matter how many times he wrote it in red above the plans he tried so hard to obscure and dismantle. 

If Gerry feels betrayed at all, it’ll be out of Jon’s hands. He can’t be accused of breaking a promise he never made in the first place.

───── ☆ ─────

The rusty click of a latch drowns itself in sounds of blood. How it manages to roar like this in his ears while he can _feel_ its chaos in his chest is beyond him, but at least he’d made it into a restroom before his knees could go lifeless out in the hall. The stall door creaks under his back when he slumps against it, but it’s only about a second before he lurches forward with an embarrassing gasp.

Wait. False alarm. Shit, no, actually— okay, alright. He’d made the right decision to skip breakfast. Point for planning ahead.

The nausea has been on and off for days. This is just the first time Gerry has needed to rush into a restroom at the Institute to fight it off. Right now, though, he can’t tell exactly _what_ it is he’s gagging on. There’s enough wrong with pretty much every individual part of his body that the distinction almost doesn’t matter. The most important thing is staying conscious. He won’t let himself pass out in a place like this, whether it’s _here_ or in the Archives themselves.

He shouldn’t look ill in front of Gertrude, if he can help it. She’s not the type of person to bother with the unwell.

His hair has all but slipped from the bun he’d looped it into this morning. His shoulders protest the action of tying it back up, but it has to be done if he’s still at risk of being sick. It’s at least something useful to do with his hands. Grinding the heel of his palm over his heart has never done anything to contain the feeling that one day it would break itself out and scuttle away like one of those Chestbursters from the old _Alien_ movies. 

Yeah. That’s definitely what this traitorous thing under his rib cage is. Some fucked up xenomorph masquerading as a quasi-functional human organ until suddenly — _BAM._ Dead.

At least one problem would be solved, if that were the case. Except now there’s a new problem, and Gerry has no idea how the hell he’d missed it.

What the hell is he _doing_ here?

It would be wishful thinking to assume he was just here to make a statement. Gerry had had plenty of time to study him while he griped at the cobbles and brushed him off; Jon was dressed like he worked here and still believed in the dress code, had a book straight out of the upstairs library and a bad attitude, and must have gone out of his way to deliberately ignore _every single warning_ that Gerry had ever begged him to heed.

What the _hell_ does he think he’s _doing here?_

When Miriam had told him over the phone that Jon had landed a research job, she had certainly neglected to tell him that it was _here._ Then again, that September, she might not have had any reason to think that Gerry would have any connection to the Magnus Institute — in 2011, he hadn’t had one beyond knowing his father had worked in the Archives. She might not have even known, depending on what Jon elected to tell her. It hadn’t come up during their last conversation, either. Gerry wishes he could say it was for good reason.

He’d called her crying in February, and she hadn’t sounded well. In between wet hiccups of apology he could hear the soft scrape of her breath through the receiver, the clipped attempts at shushing his despair. She couldn’t forgive him for relapsing, she said at first, because it’s not something he needed forgiveness for. When he kept apologizing anyway, she gave in.

He didn’t tell her how it had happened — how the hospital couldn’t have known how dearly he valued his eight months of sobriety, and even if they _had,_ there would have been no getting around the morphine. Four days half-conscious and burning alive had driven a stake into the heart of his resolve and he hadn’t been able to say no to the painkillers they sent him home with. The pain was unbearable for weeks, and that was after it had healed as much as it could. 

Eventually, it stopped being about the burns. What was left was the dent they had made in his willpower, already built on crumbling sand. Eventually, it became about the progress he had lost. The promises he’d broken. The people he’d failed.

He doesn’t remember if he had lost the list he made at her house sometime before or after, or if he had actually been stupid enough to have stepped into that churchyard with it still in his pocket. If it burned along with him, lacking in the ability to scar, or if it stayed intact long enough to be disposed of when they cut the jacket off of him. His mother hadn’t asked for the pieces back. Why would she?

Gerry had thought once that the Desolation wouldn’t have much to work with if it ever got its hands on him. It turns out that all it needed to do was wait.

Some things don’t grow back when the skin does, and the skin never grows back the same. The pain is still there in pressed-flower scatter and splattered, rotten strawberry marks, caught in the crossfire between real hurt and nerves still clinging onto a half-life. He’s always bruised easy. It’s always been so easy to mark him.

He’s clean again, now. This time he has Gertrude to thank, of course, but she hadn’t encouraged him the way Miriam had. It was almost more effective this way; he wouldn’t be of much use to her, shambling and sick. It almost didn’t matter that he’d lost the list he’d made at Miriam’s because he could borrow Gertrude’s goals for a while. He could do bigger good this way — or at least, feel like he was.

It didn’t have to be tender or anything. Frankly, he’s never responded all that well to gentleness or patience. Awareness of his propensity for obedience to ultimatums and sharpness doesn’t just deconstruct the foundation of it. Gerry sometimes wishes that love and kindness were enough to change his wiring, but a lifetime of conditioning isn’t so easily undone. Not when he’d rolled out of his mother’s cold hands and straight into Gertrude’s very busy ones.

It’s not as if she’s holding him hostage anyway. It was only after he’d cleaned himself up that she’d even considered letting him tag along in her work. 

Putting it like that made it feel like it was something he was earning, and not something she was asking of him. Gerry isn’t always sure which of those is closer to the truth. With the way his head is still reeling, complex thought is giving way to simply not wanting to be left behind.

It feels more natural than spending _all_ of his time focused on radiation or discussions about surgeries he doesn’t want. Besides, where else might he have learned how to cast a veil around a city block? There’s no such thing as a pure protection spell when you’re working with the Dread Powers, but Gerry feels better knowing that Misfit Ink is comparatively safer in obfuscation than it ever was when he was a regular client. Showing up again to get the final tattoos on the unburnt joints of his jaw was a risk he might not have taken had he not thought it to be his only chance to say goodbye to Abby. He hadn’t known he could go back without fear until Gertrude gave him the sigils.

And it’s not as Gertrude expects him to be here every single day, either. It just so happens they’re due to board a plane.

_Shit._ They’re due to board a plane.

Crossing from the stall to the door is enough to bring the dizziness back full force, despite how careful his steps are. In a final effort to correct himself, he wets his hands in the sink to pat at his face. The face in the mirror is calmer than he was expecting to see. It occurs to him, then, that none of the panic was all that real.

The ordeal of running into Jon hadn’t actually been as terrifying as it felt while his heart was reacting to standing in the archway for so long. The primary feeling Gerry can identify towards him right now is — against all hope — irritation.

Good. That feels more realistic than heartbreak.

There is no one distinctive in the hallway when he finally slips back outside. He braces his fingertips on the wall as he walks, unwilling to let the palms of his compression gloves catch and pull on the bricks. They’re new, and they’ve been helping.

By the time he reaches the Archives, he’s thoroughly winded. Catching his breath is worth the extra moment it takes, if it keeps Gertrude from giving him that _look_ she gets when he slips up in front of her and injures himself, and he can’t set a dislocation on his own.

Gerry considers himself lucky when she doesn’t look up at him at all, in fact, and instead simply says, “If that was ‘ten minutes tops’ to you, then I suspect at least one of us has forgotten how to read a clock.”

“I was just giving you time to do your thirtieth bag check.”

The look she gives him when she finally does raise her head is unimpressed and scathing, and he smiles back at her with ease. Her hands are, indeed, buried in her bag. Gerry lifts a hand to jab a thumb at the door behind him, his brow raising playfully.

“Sorry, did I catch you at twenty-nine? I’ll go do another lap—”

_“Gerard,”_ she sighs, cutting the throat of his teasing. “Enough. I’m not interested in missing our flight.”

Gerry lets his eyes roll, his hands slapping down at his sides. Gertrude gives no actual indication that she’s done futzing around with her bag beyond the vocalized distaste for tardiness. He drifts over to the long-abandoned desk across from the one she’s standing in front of and pulls himself onto the edge to sit. It feels like he’s been on his feet forever. Rocking in the cold, iron chair with the rickety leg in the courtyard feels like an ancient experience.

Sitting down in silence, Jon drifts back into his mind. Gerry twiddles his thumbs in his lap, weighing irritation against regret. 

“Gertrude?”

She gives an absent hum, her attention more focused on taking inventory of the contents of her bag. He’s never seen her pack it to the brim, or struggle with the zipper. He can hear things clinking around inside of it, hardly cushioned by the clothes underneath.

“What’s your take on unfinished business?”

That gets her to look up. Not directly at him, of course, but at the corner of her desk beside where he’s sitting. Her eyes narrow for the briefest of moments before neutrality’s stubborn return, so quick that Gerry almost wonders if she’d merely suppressed an itch.

“I make it a point not to leave _any_ business unfinished.”

With that, she turns away from him. Gerry takes the moment of privacy to mull it over.

It had taken Miriam fifty-seven years to get the second swallow tattooed on her opposite thigh, after the first one when she was seventeen. She’d told him the story when he called her from Misfit Ink’s landline the first time, at Abby’s insistence. Of course she’d gone there for the bird, probably to see whether Abby was even a real person. Of course they talked about him behind his back. Only fair.

_You_ better _call that woman, Gerry,_ Abby had scolded him. _Or I’m never putting another damn eye on you_ ever _again!_

Miriam didn’t have to remind him of her long love of maritime history. It was the personal history with barn swallows that made the difference, and the symbolism in old sailor’s tattoos. A swallow could represent every 5,000 perilous nautical miles traveled, and stand for a sailor’s worth. According to legend, since swallows return back to the same place every spring to nest, a swallow tattoo would guarantee a sailor’s safe return home. Some say if a sailor drowns, the swallows will carry his soul to heaven.

In Miriam’s case, she favoured the idea of starting a journey with one, and marking the end with another. She’d gotten the first upon leaving home and starting her new life with some measure of safety in companionship, and had told herself that she would get the second one when she felt like she’d completed something. The problem was that the moment of finality never came. She spent all that time in between feeling like she might never see anything through to the end, and that any endeavour she committed to had slipped through her fingers before she could call it complete. In her cyclical losses, she never quite felt like her long flight would ever let her rest.

It was reconnecting with Jon that did it, she said. Not just the first Passover after Gerry left her house, but two or three visits after that. It may not have been enough to undo a lifetime of missing one another, but something had changed. Something had slipped back into place, or forged itself a new one.

Gerry doesn’t remember exactly. It’s been three years since that phone call.

It doesn’t really matter if he remembers all of it, though. It’s a different time and a different place. They’re different people than they once were, and from each other. They’ve always needed different things.

But she had been so convinced that they needed each other. Some hollowed part of him suspects that he and Jon are the only ones left. If he’s right, that means no one will push him to make that call. He has to decide all on his own.

Maybe there’s a time and place for everything, and this just wasn’t it for him. This couldn’t have been it.

The scary part was being blindsided. Even if he’d seen it coming, Gerry isn’t confident that he’d have felt ready as it was. Is he healthy enough? Has he killed enough of his cancer? Is a rough year of sobriety enough, after so many tries? What could anyone want with a bookburner? Would it be worth the wait?

“Gerard,” Gertrude calls from the door, and her tone says it’s not her first try. “Stop woolgathering and get your things.”

Gerry flinches himself off the desk before he has the time to think about it. Right. There’s one place a bookburner is useful.

He’d left his own bag on the seat of a rolling chair before going out to the courtyard for his last-minute smoke. Slinging it over his shoulder, he joins Gertrude at the door and does his best not to glance nervously up and down the hall. It’s not as if Jon will just magically appear in the Archives, at least. He doesn’t belong down here.

Gerry combats the irritation still bubbling under his skin with the idea that he can confront it someday. If Jon was foolish enough to take a job here at all, then at least Gerry knows exactly where to find him now. He’ll still be here in a week. Bonus points if he’s in a better mood.

As he and Gertrude make quietly for the side door, Gerry lets himself picture some future where he learns the story behind the stress that left Jon so openly bitter, that kept his eyes on the ground. Everything that Gerry had once tentatively celebrated him maybe-escaping. Gerry hopes it isn’t anything he could solve on his own with the phone call to Miriam that he’s been neglecting to make for fear of a disconnected line and only silence as a response.

This is good, actually. Gives him some time to prepare. Maybe he can try and look a little nicer than he does right now in his travel clothes. Maybe the nausea will have passed by then, too. He can only hope the day he decides to do this will be the day that luck finally decides to favour him.

Definitely for the best. When they get back from America, he’ll just try again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **CW: character death; animal death; addiction/relapse; cancer mention (in terms of treatment); mild emetophobia (it's a false alarm, just some nausea, but better safe than sorry!)**
> 
> TRANSCRIPTS OF GERRY'S NOTES:  
> 1\. (in childish handwriting) _"I hope you never have to use this"_  
>  2\. (in his current handwriting) _"Whatever you're thinking — DON'T"_
> 
> sidenote, [this is my explanation for his prickly bullshit](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/619592971062509568/) when he first joins the archives! yes, background casual jontim is a thing because guess what! jon has had a life these past few years. people do things! people have people. it's okay!
> 
> yell at me on tumblr @[gerrydelano](http://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/) if the comments aren't enough to sate your rage and sorrow!


	15. turn a corner

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gerry looks like he’s holding himself back from asking questions, or answering too many. He does _not_ look like the empty-eyed, sleepless, miserable person in those mugshots. If it weren’t for all the context, Tim wouldn’t have guessed that they were the same person.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a special chapter! MANY surprises in store here.
> 
> we have more fanart, too!  
> \+ here are [some BEAUTIFUL drawings of gerry and miriam](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/623055717673369601) by @littlerobinsart!  
> \+ and here's a bonus [headcanon about jon and miriam cooking](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/623006253376045056) by @dragimal, too!
> 
> transcript of a handwritten note in the end notes! image after the word "mystique."

_turn a corner - a critical point on the way to somewhere better or safer_

───── ☆ ─────

The kid couldn’t have been more than five or six. Not near old enough yet to know _not_ to stare at people across the way on the tube, to tug on their mum’s sleeve and ask in a not-so-conspicuous whisper, _“Why does he look like that?”_

Not near old enough to be cross with. Not his kid, not his problem. Just his face, and all that. Nothing Tim couldn’t compartmentalize.

He shouldn’t have let it get to him. Should have just looked the kid in the eye and deadpanned something harmless like _“chicken pox,”_ shrugged _“make sure you get them vaccinated”_ at the mother. Had a little fun and said, _“Right, so, you know those little toothpick umbrellas they put in tropical drinks?_ Very _dangerous. Last time_ I _fuck around with a Mai Tai.”_

‘Course, this was three days ago. He’d just taken out his hearing aids until he got to work, and spent the rest of the day wondering how the _hell_ a single, innocent question from some random little kid could make him want to hide in bed for the next four months. Pathetic, honestly. What good was all that time spent in therapy during uni if he was just going to wake up one day and have to acknowledge that his coping mechanisms weren’t worm-proof? Thanks for exactly nothing, _Jeff._

It’s been a week or so since quitting on the bigger bandages he’s been sporting. Still got them on the deeper ones — side of his neck, just shy of the right corner of his mouth _(Christ_ , _of_ all _places)_ — but he’s been given the go ahead to start letting himself breathe. 

Not that it really feels like breathing. Mostly just feels like shit. It still _itches._

Some part of him misses the rest of the bandages. He couldn’t scratch worth a damn with them on, and he’d take the bruise of trying over the risk of pulling something back open. The problem is just that they were more trouble than they were worth. The edges overlapped onto other wounds too far to cover with the same padding, but too near to escape the adhesive without trimming them. It was a bitch to put them on. It was a bitch to peel them off. 

It was hard to decide whether the pain of irritating his skin was worth the illusory relief of pretending there was nothing wrong with it. That once he took them off, everything underneath would be magically cleaned away. Sores became scabs became scars became shame, and the best that Tim could do was leave his hair down.

Not today, though. Nope. Today, he’d tied it up _before_ leaving the house, had grit his teeth through the sharp pain of lifting his arms to get it done. Pretty sure leaving it down made him look like the girl from _The Ring_ anyway, and really, how was that supposed to stop people from staring? 

He’s finished being a coward about it. Today, he’s going to cross through the lobby with his head up and he’s going to smile at Rosie as he passes her desk like he’s done every day since learning her name. He should take a leaf out of her book, really. She never wants to dwell on the terrible things that go on here. It was stupid to be afraid of how she would look at him on that first day back, on the second. After that kid on the tube managed to make Tim feel so starkly alienated that he almost forgot he wasn’t the only one who had gone through this.

Jon hasn’t been very chatty lately. Tim knows better than to think that’s just his natural state of being. It used to be so easy to convince him to come along to Ernie’s after work. This isn’t the first time Tim’s found himself missing those days. They weren’t even that long ago.

Well, if Jon thinks he’s getting out of it tonight, he’s got another thing coming. If they don’t at least _try_ to do something close to normal, Tim’s fairly certain he’ll blow a gasket. As much as he’s decided that he _hates_ it here, the past month has been more than a little lonely.

Rosie lifts her head when he steps through the front door and returns his sheepish wave, seamless and friendly even as she continues her conversation over the phone. Tim finds himself relieved that there had been no reason to feel guilty that he might have been too slow to produce a proper _hello._ So far so good. All he has to do now is make it to the basement.

He barely makes it two steps past Rosie’s desk before he sees the dog. An instinctive delight springs up in his chest before he realizes that it’s wearing a working vest and a bridge handle, and any plans to ask if he could pet it go right out the window. That might not have been the brightest idea anyway, given how unhappy it looks.

Okay, hold on. That’s a _really_ unhappy dog.

Tim’s stomach goes tight with apprehension. He slows himself down and drifts nearer to a wall, observing from a distance for a better look at the situation as he crosses the lobby.

The dog is sleek and silver and just shy of snarling, positioned defensively between its handler and Elias Bouchard. Even with his back turned, the posture is unmistakable. Elias looks entirely nonplussed, his hands folded neatly behind him as the dog glares and fidgets.

Tim would love to think, _alright, small wonder it’s pissed off,_ but he can’t help the cold ooze of uncomfortable shock sliding down the walls of his chest cavity. Elias is a creep and a bastard, no question, but since when is he the kind of person to get in someone’s face while their _service animal_ is clearly saying _back away?_

Thoughts that the dog might be poorly trained don’t even cross Tim’s mind; the handler has it short-leashed, not keeping it from lunging, but holding it protectively to their legs while Elias is still in soft-spoken proximity. Their eyes are wide and fixed dead on Elias, jaw tight with what looks like painful restraint. They’re so tense that Tim can see it from across the room, anger and fear coming off of them in waves.

The look on their face is almost enough to make Tim storm over and interrupt. It’s the look on their face that tells him that he shouldn’t dare.

Tim finds himself kneeling on the ground instead. His shoelace comes undone between his fingers and he takes his time in tying it back up, his bag sliding quietly from his arm to rest beside him on the tile. Something about this makes his skin crawl, and Tim has had ample time to decide that he would never use that phrase lightly again.

He strains to listen, holding his breath. Eavesdropping has never been his forte, but Rosie’s hung up her phone. The room is as silent as it’ll get. He can almost make the words out.

“And really, after everything you’ve been through, I would have thought you would be past taking unnecessary risks like this.”

Haha. Okay. Hang on. That could not have been a _death threat._ In the middle of the lobby, in broad daylight? In front of G-d and Rosie and everyone?

Glancing up, he registers movement. Elias steps past the handler and in the direction of his office, still paying little mind to the dog. In passing, he sets his hand on their shoulder with a pat that could have been construed as friendly with every single ounce of context surgically cut away. The handler’s shoulder hikes up in a halted flinch, their head jerking away and their eyes finally snapping shut on a sharp intake of breath. Tim swallows a flash of something so searing that it freezes, hands clutching his knees in preparation to push himself up to stand.

“Lovely to see you, Gerard. Let’s agree to make certain this is the last time.”

Tim swallows something so cold that it burns.

As Elias disappears down the hallway, the handler sways in the center of the lobby.

For a long moment, he stays standing where the tile spreads out in a starburst and the room appears all the emptier around him. The dog is rubbing itself anxiously on his legs, whining for attention now that the leash has been released, nosing at his hands in concern. He steadies the dog by steadying himself on the bridge handle, his head dropped forward as if battling collapse.

A thousand contradicting urges clash like metal in Tim’s mind before he reasons that he needs to finish tying his shoe before he chooses one. Not sure when his hands started feeling so numb. Standing up is the real trial, though. His legs protest the strain of straightening up more than they fought the initial fold. If he’d bolted upright before, he might have tipped over. 

For that, he supposes it’s best that he hadn’t, but now that Elias is gone, Tim isn’t sure _why_ he’s still battling between starting a conversation and pretending he hadn’t just witnessed that display at all. He _has_ to say _something,_ there’s no way that isn’t— 

When Tim looks back to the center of the room, the handler’s eyes are already locked on him.

Normally, Tim might be embarrassed about the way his heart grinds to a stop in his chest, but the handler doesn’t give him the chance. By the time it occurs to him that it’s unfair to make someone who limps like that walk towards him without moving to meet them in the middle, he’s close enough to speak without shouting across the empty lobby.

“Hey,” he says, and his voice sounds nothing like Tim had imagined it in his head. Too soft, almost, in a way he can’t blame on low batteries.

It takes about half a second to be absolutely certain.

The top half of his hair is pulled back from his face enough that Tim can see the little eye tattoos nestled behind his cheekbones. That alone speaks directly to the part of Tim’s brain that remembers digging into the murder of Mary Keay. He hadn’t had the ink in those mugshots, but they were mentioned in that one statement, the one that makes the mottled tinge creeping up from underneath his unbuttoned collar make too much sense to make sense of.

Even the shape of his face looks softer than in the photos, but there’s no mistaking. Tim hears _Gerard Keay_ and knows exactly who he is, even if Jon only ever calls him “Gerry.”

“You work down there?” 

Tim shakes himself out of the stupor. “Um. Wh—?”

“The basement. You work downstairs.”

Tim glances quickly off to either side; he’s still angled towards the hall that leads to the staircases, but that doesn’t seem to be how Gerry made the conjecture.

Gerry is looking at him — really _looking_ at him. Tim feels his eyes bounce between the holes still healing on his face and his instinct is to shy away, to take offense, but Gerry looks more like he’s doing math in his head than anything. It’s easier for Tim to assume he’s heard about Prentiss than it is to feel ugly or preemptively rejected, as is usually the case when someone this pretty studies him for a little too long without smiling.

“I— yeah, I do, oh, my G-d.”

“...What.”

Gerry’s frown is suspicious, but there are traces of embarrassment under the purple shadows beneath his eyes. There’s so much more colour in his face than Tim would have expected from the stories. He never would have expected pink eyeshadow.

Tim shakes his head in astonishment. “Just— _wow?_ You’re… not dead!”

The judgmental confusion that crosses Gerry’s face could have made Tim smack himself for sounding so _stupid_ if he didn’t recover quickly enough to huff out a humourless laugh.

“Yeah, well, not for long if I don’t get out of here fast.” 

Gerry looks over his shoulder. Tim’s eyes flicker to the hallway Elias had taken, something complicated twisting in his chest. Anxiety, anger? There’s enough humiliation and awe still in there to make his head feel full of rocks. Just so many rocks.

“...Right, yeah, that reminds me, what the hell _was_ all that?”

Gerry cuts eyes at him, and then to the front door. “A verbal pink slip.”

“You _worked here?”_

“Not physically.”

Tim blinks. Gerry blinks back, before his eyes narrow with a question that sounds more tentative than he looks. “You… know the new Archivist, then?”

_“Do_ I!” Tim snaps his fingers, distantly aware of the smile on his face even when he can’t quite feel the right side. “We go _way_ back. Not as far back as you, though, right?”

Gerry bites his lips together, one of the studs pinned underneath wiggling with the press of his tongue. He looks like he’s holding himself back from asking questions, or answering too many. He does _not_ look like the empty-eyed, sleepless, miserable person in those mugshots. If it weren’t for all the context, Tim wouldn’t have guessed that they were the same person.

But they _are_ the same person, and, “G-d, Jon’s going to lose his _mind,_ he’s been—”

Tim cuts himself off from a disbelieving laugh as his windpipe ties itself into a knot. The crease of Gerry’s forehead goes from down in faint annoyance to upwards with a flash of earnest hope that makes Tim’s heart skip another embarrassing beat. Gerry doesn’t have the time to stand here and explain, apparently, so if Tim is going to tell him this, it has to be fast. Leaning forward, he lowers his voice.

“He’s been looking _everywhere_ for you! You have to know that, right? Wait… did you come here to—?”

Gerry’s expression flattens again. Tim puts the pieces together. 

His hair is shorter than in the old pictures, only about chin length. It looks freshly dyed, no roots showing, so he must have touched it up recently. His eye makeup is neatly done, the pigment surely meant to match the pink mesh top he’s wearing under the button-up, and for the first time, Tim can comprehend the faint scent of something floral coming off of him. He spent time looking nice to come here. This was special to him.

Tim straightens up, his brow low with understanding.

“... And Elias doesn’t want you to make contact with him.”

Gerry’s face doesn’t shift. “Apparently not.”

“But you’re going to do it anyway, right? I mean… you can’t just _give up,_ after all this. I mean, alright, I _did_ bet that you were still alive, but I didn’t really _believe_ — Christ, okay, yeah. Sorry. Shutting up now.”

Gerry stares at him through the babbling, his pierced eyebrow raised. Tim would very much like to dig a hole somewhere and bury himself in it.

“I’m starting to understand why Elias wants me gone.” With a sigh, Gerry glances back towards the hall that leads to the basement. 

Tim stays rooted as Gerry angles himself closer to him, like there’s someone on the other side of the room aside from Rosie who might hear them whispering. He flinches a little when something bumps his knee; oh, right, there’s a dog standing between them. It’s been so quiet since this conversation started. All traces of agitation vanished along with Elias.

“I need you to give him something for me.”

_Another necklace?_ Tim almost teases, because he’s seen the dragon claw. Jon takes off his tie when they go out drinking, unbuttons his collar (two or three buttons down, if Tim’s lucky). The first time the pendant fell out from under his shirt, Tim had poked fun at him for the style. It didn’t take more than a second of stammering for Tim to suspect that an old flame had given it to him, but it took getting a few drinks in him for Jon to divulge enough information to coordinate _Operation Dawson._

Sweet Jesus, he’s been calling this poor bastard _Gerry Dawson_ in his head for the past two years, even after Sasha found the record of his name change. Jon better not rat him out for that.

“Do you have a piece of paper?”

Tim pats himself down, twisting his bag around to start rifling through it. “Shit, I don’t.”

Gerry nods and waves a hand as if to say _come with me_ and turns towards Rosie’s desk. Tim watches him for a moment before following, eyes skipping down to the dog at his side, to his legs as he walks. The limp is faint, and he feels wrong for staring, but in his defense, this is a _lot_ to take in.

“Hi, Rosie.”

Gerry’s tone is gentle and fond. Rosie looks up from her schedule book, her phone long since hung up in the receiver. Her eyes widen a fraction before her mouth pulls into a warm smile, polite and full with recognition.

“Gerard, you’re back! Just in time, too.” Her brow draws as she sits up a bit, glancing around the lobby. “I didn’t see you come in?”

“Oh, uh—”

Rosie shuts her eyes and raises her hands in a delicate gesture for _zip it,_ still smiling. “You know what? Don’t tell me. Did everything go alright?”

Gerry wrinkles his nose. “Pending.”

“Oh, no.” She tuts, tilting her head. “Anything I can do?”

He gives a soft laugh, somewhere between bashful and fatigued. “Spare sheet of paper, if you’ve got.”

She rolls back in her chair to open up a drawer, fishing around for a notepad to tear a sheet out of and pass over the counter. Tim restrains himself from peering over Gerry’s arm as he scribbles his urgent note, glancing nervously between the hallway that Elias had disappeared down and over the counter at Rosie as she opens another drawer.

He can’t help the petty, scandalized feeling that drops his mouth open as she pulls out a tin of Simpkins boiled sweets and slides it towards Gerry on the counter. After a moment, Rosie’s eyes skip over Tim’s face and she just barely masks her sympathy with another smile, gesturing for him to take one, too. First time in all the years he’s worked here, _now_ he gets one of her secret Simpkins. A _pity_ Simpkins. Tim takes one without checking the colour, only realizing when he pops it in his mouth that it’s blackberry.

When Gerry hands her back her pencil, he plucks an orange one out of the tin. He doesn’t eat it right away, until he seems to realize that he’s already operating with just one hand and needs both to fold the paper into quarters. Tim glances down at the dog only to see that it’s picked up its own leash off the ground and is holding it patiently in its mouth.

Gerry thanks Rosie softly just before her phone rings again, and she gives him a quick wave with her fingertips before turning her focus to the call. His eyes linger on her for a second longer before he faces Tim with the note outstretched.

“Here,” Gerry says, faintly muffled by the fruit drop held in his cheek. “Make sure he gets this. And be careful.”

On another day, Tim might slip the note into his shirt pocket and take his time moseying down to the Archives. For now, he just holds onto it tightly.

“Will do. Hey, um…”

But Gerry’s already slipped past him to move towards the front entrance. He’s halfway out the door before he turns his head to call out a soft _thanks_ over his shoulder, and then all that’s left to stare at is bright sunlight through the glass.

Tim gets it. Can’t exactly be offended by some guy valuing his life more than a handshake, or whatever it was Tim might have tried to say. His own name? Hardly matters.

“Oh, Tim!”

Tim freezes in his attempt at crossing the lobby again, turning back to look over his shoulder. “Yeah, Rosie?”

“That was Elias on the—” 

A loud _crunch_ resounds from somewhere inside Tim’s mouth. Rosie’s eyes go wide. Tim smiles past the new ache in his teeth, gesturing for her to continue as he tries to shepherd the shards of blackberry into one cheek. Ow.

“...That was Elias on the phone just now. He said he’d like you to stop by his office. Might as well go on up now, since you’re right here.”

A laugh shakes out of his mouth as he steps backwards. “Right, yeah, of course! I just want to go, uh— drop my bag off at my desk. Stretch my legs some. Could use the walking! Keeping up with my PT and everything, haha. I’ll be there in, uh… when I get there!”

“But—” 

“Thanks, Rosie, you’re the best!”

She doesn’t call his name again, leaving him to finally cross over towards the staircase to the basement uninterrupted. He’s put in _more_ than a few complaints about there being no damn lift in this piece of crap building before, not even on his own behalf, but there’s a strange satisfaction in rushing down the steps after stewing in all that tension.

That is, of course, until his left thigh decides to cast a shock of pain up to his hip. He stops to catch a railing on the middle landing to wait for it to pass, hissing as he kneads at the muscle with the heel of his hand still holding the note.

Ordinarily, Tim might feel a little guilty for opening it and snooping, but he thinks he’s got at least somewhat of a right to it considering Elias might kill him next. If he’s going down for meddling, he’s going to at _least_ die with the knowledge of exactly what kind of clandestine schoolyard note passing ritual he’s actually facilitating here.

At the top of the page is a street address in Mitcham, which Tim supposes makes enough sense for a super secret rendezvous site. Who the hell would look for them in Mitcham? He has to assume it’s strategic, because what’s underneath it really threatens the mystique.

The little white dinosaurs embroidered on Gerry’s button-up are suddenly incredibly sappy. If Tim miraculously comes out of this _not_ murdered and does get to see him again someday, he makes a mental note to never let him live it down.

Mitcham is about a twenty-minute drive from here, give or take. Jon can catch a taxi or something. The amount of time it’ll take to actually prepare him for this ought to give Gerry the head start he needs to get there first, too. And who knows? Maybe they’ll run off together and elope, and Tim will be lured to the Eiffel Tower on a Tuesday to be taken out by a hitman of Elias’ choosing (if he can’t sweet-talk the hitman into letting him take _them_ out to a nice dinner instead.) At this point, Tim isn’t ruling out any wild possibilities.

Eh. As long as Sasha promises to remember him, he supposes he can live with that. Or, not live. Whatever.

Predictably, Jon is shut away in his office. Tim knocks on the narrow glass pane set in the center of the door and watches him bolt upright from where he’s slouched over his desk, waves cheerily at him while he presses a hand to his chest to catch his breath. Dramatic as ever. It’s the day for that, Tim thinks.

It’s a pleasant surprise when Jon flaps a hand at him to invite him into the room. For the past few days, he’s been locking the door. He must be tired of needing to get up to let someone in every time they have a question that isn’t worth straining his bad leg.

“Hey, boss,” Tim smiles, poking his head into the room before straightening up to slip inside. “Rough morning?”

“It’s morning,” Jon grumbles, his fingertips poised at his temples. There’s still a bandage stuck to one side. “If you’re going to ask if I skipped breakfast, Martin’s already harangued me about it. The answer is yes, and _no,_ I don’t want your spare granola bar.”

“Ouch,” Tim hisses. “You act like it’s poison.”

Jon’s eyes snap up to glare at him. Alright. So, that one didn’t land.

“Anyway!” Tim claps his hands together, striding over to the desk. “Lucky for you, I come bearing gifts. It’s actually _better_ than my granola, which is already good and not poison.”

Now Jon just rolls his eyes. “What is it, then?”

With flourish, Tim lifts up the note.

“Special delivery.” When Jon’s eyes narrow in suspicion, Tim holds it towards him in offering. “You _really_ want to read this. Just try not to freak out, yeah?”

After a beat, Jon snatches it from his hand. Tim leans his palms on the edge of the desk and watches him unfold it, anticipation warring with the mess of everything else still tumbling over itself in his chest. There is a weight on his back, heavy in small places, like the holes there are filling up with cold sand. It shifts, one at a time, and he rolls his neck to will it away.

Jon’s eyes skip across the paper once before they go round as coins. Tim watches his face go through expressions like a sky cycle, moving next to something like horror and ending somewhere pale. When he finally tears his gaze off the page to look up at Tim, his mouth is parted in wordless shock until he manages a strangled question.

“Is this your idea of a joke?”

Tim fights the strong urge to recoil. Every chaotic thing zipping around in his chest goes leaden all at once and drops hard like an anvil.

“Jon, I would _never—_ Look, alright, see?” He leans forward to point at the triceratops, glancing desperately back to Jon’s face for some sign of belief. “I have no idea what the hell that’s all about. He didn’t tell me before he booked it out the door.”

Jon blinks, head shaking. “You’re… telling me he was _right here,_ in the Institute? A-And you didn’t think to— to call me, or come get me, or—?”

“I think he tried! But then Elias—”

_“Elias?_ Tim, what are you—”

“Okay, are you gonna let me get a word in edgewise?” That shouldn’t have come out on the tail ends of a laugh, but Tim can’t take it back now. 

Jon has half-risen from his chair, like he might be gearing up to take his chances with gunning it past Tim to get out the door. Tim might be prepared to bodyblock him were it not for the fact that he still looks entirely too shaken to even make the attempt. Tim doesn’t buy the accusatory squaring of his jaw. Not with that much hurt still in his eyes.

“Look, just… sit down, and let me explain.”

Jon doesn’t sit back down. _“Explain,_ then, because if I find out this is some sort of prank—” 

“Jon,” Tim repeats, and he wishes he could be shocked by how wounded it sounds. The slump of his shoulders pinches something in his neck. “Why would I do that to you?”

Jon sputters for a moment. “W-Well… Because—”

“Because _nothing._ I know how much this means to you.” Tim crosses his arms, rolling his shoulder to soothe the static of the bothered nerve. “Besides, Elias is probably going to want my head on a spike for this, too.”

“Why would Elias care about _any_ of this?” Jon leans his own hands on the desk. His cane is propped against the drawers beside him.

“If you’d let me start from the beginning, you’ll be surprised how quick that question gets answered.”

Jon’s face sours, but he doesn’t open his mouth again. With the hand not holding onto the slip of paper, he gestures for Tim to continue. Tim takes a short bow in sardonic thanks, and steels himself to recount the last ten minutes as accurately as possible.

The sour frown twists itself unstable, and Jon eventually hides it behind his free hand. He nods along with Tim’s story, interruptions half-bitten and stemmed until Tim circles back around to Elias’ ultra creepy departure from the lobby. Jon slaps his hand back down onto the desk as he shakes his head, only his fingertips catching before slipping off the edge.

“Are you  _ positive _ that’s what you heard?” he asks. Tim rolls his eyes.

“You know, for  _ once, _ Jon, I’m  _ pretty  _ sure. Especially considering Gerry confirmed it not five seconds later.”

It looks like Jon is trying his hardest to remain unconvinced for as long as he can. Tim can see the jitter in his frame more than he can hear him tapping his foot. Jon shakes his head, skeptical and grasping.

“I find it _hard_ to believe that Elias would threaten someone’s _life_ like that. At least not right there in public, with— with other _people_ around.”

Tim laughs. “Yeah, sure. Give me an hour and I’m sure I’ll be able to confirm whether he saves them for the privacy of his office, too, because I’m definitely next.”

Jon’s face twists, his hands held up to silence him like Rosie had silenced Gerry earlier, but markedly less polite. “Even if that _were_ the case, who would be that careless?”

“Careless?” Tim repeats, pointing a finger for emphasis. “Or _confident?_ Because it didn’t make sense to me, either. But even the _dog_ knew! Dogs know things, Jon.”

“Well… even if he didn’t know you were there, Rosie was right at her desk!”

“Yeah, on the _phone._ You know how hard she ignores everything that goes on around here, come on.” Tim waves a hand up by his ear. “She doesn’t even have my excuse.”

Jon crosses his arms to grip at his elbows; fidgeting, squeezing. “Not everything, though.” He glances at Tim, eyes pinched. “You… you said she knew him?”

Tim nods. “They were friendly, yeah. She gave him one of her secret Simpkins and everything.”

“A secret—?”

“She keeps fruit drops in her desk.” Tim sticks out his tongue to point at where he’s pretty sure most of the purple would be concentrated. “I finally got one, see?”

Jon grimaces. “Delightful, yes, alright. Put that away, please.”

Tim does as asked, clinging to the momentary urge to laugh again. Any trace of amusement is pitifully short-lived, anxiety still roiling in his lungs.

“Right after he left, though, Rosie got a call from Elias and tried sending me up to his office. I blew it off and came straight down here instead.”

For a moment, Jon looks stricken. “Why would you do that, after what you heard? If you really believe he’s a threat?”

“He might be a threat, but you’re my friend.” Tim pauses when Jon does, clearing his throat. “And we’ve put way too much work into this operation for me to let that waste of a suit tell me what to do.”

Something flickers across Jon’s face, his weight shifting. “You can’t avoid him forever.”

“I don’t need to,” Tim shrugs. “I just need to get you out the door.”

At that, a wet sort of laugh leaps out of Jon’s mouth. Suddenly he’s smiling, his eyes trained on the ceiling instead of Tim’s face as his hands slip from his elbows to flap messily in front of him. He stumbles backwards like he’s forgotten there’s a chair behind him, the smile curving into a wince as he bites back another not-laugh that wouldn’t have fooled Tim for a second had he been able to let it out.

Tim steps around the desk, his hands up in surrender and offering. “Hey, hey. It’s not so bad, alright? We’ll figure it out.”

Jon shakes his head, too boxed in by his office furniture to step further backwards. His words tremble with a weak attempt at sounding calm and unaffected. “Oh, no, I know! I know that. I-I’m fine, it’s not that I’m— I’m just—”

“Overwhelmed?”

Now he nods, and the force of it almost makes Tim’s head ache by proxy. He should have been more careful about this, but what other way could he have said it? The facts are the facts. Gerry Delano was here in the Institute, he was looking for Jon just as hard as Jon has been looking for him, and Elias had some kind of problem with it. 

Tim knows which part of that equation is technically the most important, but if it means that he can buy Jon some time, Tim will confidently put himself in the middle. If it means at least one of them can find what they’d come to this place looking for, Tim will deliver as many dangerous notes as he needs to.

“Let it out for a minute, then,” Tim says. “I’m right here.”

Jon finally gives up on forcing lightness and lets himself look frustrated, his chin ducked to his chest as he tries to control his hands. He tucks his elbows so tightly to his sides that Tim almost worries for his ribs, almost reaches out before asking if he can. His body language says _don’t make fun of me_ long before he manages to say it aloud, and Tim’s heart breaks just that little bit more.

“Never,” he says, as gently as he can. “Alright, step one. Come on.”

Tim knows what comes first here. He’s known since the first time he didn’t know what to do, and had been bold enough to voice his discontent with that helplessness. Jon’s response was to tell him all about cattle squeeze chutes, as if he needed to justify needing to be held. They were still research assistants back then, and eventually he came to trust that Tim would be ready to drop everything to cover for him. Whether he needed a human shield to get from a crowded room to an empty one, or deep pressure on the breakroom couch after locking the door, Tim has never thought twice about it.

The hesitation before Jon accepts feels like an eternity, but eventually he gives in. Tim knows by now that what Jon wants is to be able to hold his arms still, so he lets him fold them up between them, sets his jaw against the way Jon’s watch presses hard against a sore spot on his chest. Jon stiffens in the same discomfort when Tim’s arms come to wrap around his shoulders and back, but a whispered apology seems to do the trick. 

Jon apologizes, too, in between attempts to explain himself.

“I’m not really _this_ upset.”

“I know.”

“My body just does this sometimes, even— even when my brain is completely fine, which it is.”

“I know, I understand.”

“I just want to be clear that I’m not blowing this as far out of proportion as it looks, this is— this is entirely involuntary, I-I’m really fine.”

“I know.”

“You shouldn’t do this if it hurts you.”

Tim elects not to respond to that. Instead, he exaggerates his own breathing to set an example, swaying as evenly from foot to foot as balance will allow them both. Neither of them can avoid the other’s wounds. The only thing to do is soldier through it until it hurts less.

When Jon wiggles himself free, he wrings his hands together. His face isn’t wet or anything, but Tim wishes he didn’t still look so ashamed of himself. Reaching up to brush a strand of hair away from his face is second nature.

“You know,” Tim says, “I’m pretty sure he dressed up for you.”

Jon stares up at him. “What?”

“Yep! Fancy eyeliner and everything. Whole nine yards.” 

His frown deepens with indignation, colour rising in his cheeks. “You can’t be serious.”

“Jon. I am actually begging you to trust how serious I am and have been about this entire situation from minute one. I could not make this up.”

Jon’s chin wobbles a bit, but he argues no further. He shrugs himself out of Tim’s grip and faces his desk again, turning to the note where he’d dropped it. He rereads it again and then looks up at the clock, straightening in renewed panic.

“How long ago was this?” he asks, as if Tim has any idea how long they’ve been standing here wasting time. Tim shrugs, helpless.

“Long enough, probably? Honestly, I wanted to give him some time to get out before sending you after him.” 

For all they knew, Gerry could have needed to have his own little meltdown in private, too. All that effort, just to be cornered and banned from the premises by a sketchy bureaucrat? Tim would be surprised if he managed to keep his cool until he reached the next city block over.

Jon finally drops back into his chair to reach for a drawer, careless for how his cane topples to the floor when he pulls it open. He digs through it until he finds a black, spiral-bound notebook and slaps it onto the desk, swiveling around to grab his bag off the ground by the strap. Tim’s brow dips.

“What’s that?”

“It’s nothing,” Jon says briskly, hefting his bag up onto his lap to start rifling through it. Tim crosses his arms, leaning his hip on the edge of the desk. Clearly not the time to ask.

Jon drags a few heavy folders out of his bag to haphazardly fling them onto the desk, stuffing the notebook inside in their place. He bends down to retrieve his cane before he starts to stand up, making his way around towards the door. Tim bolts upright after him, stepping around the other side to cut off his path.

“Whoa, whoa, wait!”

A flash of anger widens Jon’s eyes. “Tim, I need to _go.”_

“You sure do,” Tim agrees. “But did you miss the part where I said he dressed up for you? There were little dinosaurs on his shirt, did I mention that?”

Jon’s jaw clenches. “...There were?”

“Stitched right in! You know, that coupled with the whole,” Tim gestures to the note clenched in Jon’s hand, _“that,_ really leads me to believe he’s trying to tell you something. What do dinosaurs mean, Jon?”

“I— I hardly have the time to explain that.”

“Right. Priorities.” Tim nods. “I know you clean up nice, but we need to prove you can do it in a pinch.”

“Excuse me?”

Tim props his hands on his hips, eyes flickering up and down Jon’s front. “Lose the sweater vest.”

Jon looks down at himself in dismay, and back up at Tim with offense. _“Tim.”_

“Give it here.” Tim snaps his fingers. “If I let you go after him looking like a nerd, it’d be on my conscience forever.”

“It isn’t like this is some sort of _date.”_

Tim laughs. “Tell that to the guy in the pink eyeshadow.”

It’s almost sad how flustered Jon ends up looking when he’s trying not to look flustered. Tim ignores the ache in his chest, waving his hand again. “Sweater vest. Come on, hurry up!”

“Tim, I swear to—” Jon cuts himself off this time with a disgruntled noise, eyes rolling as he shifts his bag from his shoulder to hand it off to Tim by the strap. He angles his body away as he pulls the sweater vest up over his chest before he pauses. His upper arm hides the wince, but not the hiss. Tim knows better than to offer to help him undress, or worse, draw attention to the fact that all of his efforts to shield Jon’s head and neck from the worms had still left his back exposed.

Tim takes the sweater vest to toss onto a nearby cabinet while Jon straightens up to catch his breath. His button-up is still tucked in neatly enough. It’s a deep navy blue, with silvery buttons. Goes well with the slate grey slacks.

“Much better,” Tim comments, still studying him. “Now your hair.”

“What _about_ my hair?” Jon complains, but he doesn’t protest as Tim steps closer to reach over his shoulders for the nape of his neck. There are still loose strands wisping from his ponytail, disturbed all the more by the motion of pulling a shirt over his head.

Tim undoes the elastic and slips it onto his own wrist. It doesn’t take much fluffing to coax Jon’s hair into more presentable waves. He’d kept it so short back in research. Tim hadn’t needed to lecture him on how long hair and professionalism aren’t mutually exclusive. He hadn’t needed to in order to set the example.

Jon stands still while Tim rearranges his hair to frame his face more deliberately, staring up at him with almost a pout. Tim refuses to look at it, focused on his task until he remembers something important.

“Shit, do you have the necklace?”

Jon pats at his chest for a moment like he’s lost it, half-spinning around to face his desk. It only takes a second for him to realize that he is, in fact, wearing it under his shirt like always. His shoulders sag with relief before he reaches into his collar to fish it out by the chain, at which point Tim reaches for him again to undo the first button for him. And the second. Just in case.

He steps back to give Jon space when he’s waved off. Jon rests his cane against his hip so he can use both hands to try and lay the pendant flat, a formless mutter rolling in his mouth. Tim leans his lesser-bitten arm against the wall and watches him wrestle with it, tipping his head against the doorframe.

“Know what you’re going to say to him?”

Jon glances up, startled, before casting his eyes back down. “I’m sure I’ll think of something, in the moment.”

“You mean you haven’t rehearsed anything?”

A scoff. “Of course I have. I just can’t remember any of it now.”

Makes sense. Tim nods. He’s thought of a thing or two he’d like to say to the famous Gerard Keay before, all of which went right down the tube the second the guy was right in front of him. Probably not a universal experience. At least Jon knows what he’s getting into, and he’ll have the whole drive to Mitcham to think about it.

“Just make sure you kiss him at some point,” Tim sighs. “If you don’t and I still die for this, expect one _hell_ of a haunting.”

“Jesus Chr—” Jon drops his arms, his palm curling around the handle of his cane again. “Tim, I’m not going to just—”

“Oh, you absolutely are.” Tim laughs. “You’re gonna take one look at him and this argument you’re trying to put up won’t make a _lick_ of sense anymore. Mark my words.”

Jon bristles defensively, but doubt in his voice says more. “I don’t even _know_ him.”

“Sure you do,” Tim shrugs. “He’s your good pal Gerry who you’ve missed very much, and who you’ve been on a literal quest to find. And you’ve read all about him! You know plenty.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s _romantic,_ that would be— it would be ludicrous, Tim, if not just wildly inappropriate.”

Tim makes a point to glare down at the pendant settled over Jon’s sternum, and then back up at his face. Exhaustion and defeat quickly overtake the protest lingering in his eyes.

“...Well, I’m a complete stranger to him.”

“Um, no, you’re not.” Tim pushes away from the wall. “Need I remind you _again_ of how this all came to pass. He came here to _woo you._ Specifically to do that.”

Now Jon rolls his eyes again. “You don’t _know_ that’s the reason.”

“One look, Jon! One look, and you’ll get it. Okay?”

He hadn’t meant to snap that first part. The smile it jumped out of doesn’t seem to have helped; Jon still looks taken aback, even after he’d tried to soften it. 

Well, it’s not his fault that Jon is being purposefully obtuse. Tim lets out a slow breath. 

“Seriously, can you just trust me on this? Please?”

Jon chews his lip. He doesn’t nod an agreement, instead glancing at the doorknob before he makes a reach for it. Tim steps out of the office after him, stopping him by the elbow before he can cross past his desk in the bullpen. Martin and Sasha are nowhere to be seen, and that’s probably for the best. Tim will have plenty of time to explain Jon’s disappearance to them after he is hopefully not slaughtered in Elias’ office.

Fuck. The longer he stalls, the worse the meeting will probably be. Surprisingly terrible incentive to hurry up.

After Jon stands painstakingly still and lets Tim spritz him once with the travel-sized spray bottle of cologne he keeps in his bag, he storms towards the door. Tim rushes forward to hold it open for him. Jon faces him with incredulity and a harsh whisper.

“What, are you going to follow me up there?”

Tim nods, brow twisted up. “Obviously? Like hell I’m going to risk Elias accosting _you_ in the lobby next. I’m walking you out.”

The refusal to install a lift has always been the worst part of working down here, aside from the inherent vulnerability to worm siege. Tim still can’t claim to know what it’s like for Jon to climb these stairs every day, but it’s certainly not as easy as it used to be.

Tim keeps a hand hovering over the small of Jon’s back as they cross the lobby, glancing around and over his shoulder. Jon doesn’t elbow him away, busy glancing off to the other side. They would probably look utterly bizarre to Rosie if she were to lift her head from her keyboard. Luckily, though, they reach the door unhindered.

And for whatever reason, they both stop to stand in the beam of sunlight stretching out from the glass door and face one another. Jon keeps his head turned to squint out at the street, his knee jittering anxiously.

“This is really it, isn’t it?” he asks, and Tim can think of a thousand ways to interpret it that are most certainly not what he really means. Instead of letting himself fall down _that_ rabbit hole, Tim lifts a hand up to smooth another flyaway strand of hair back from Jon’s face.

“Sure is,” Tim agrees, because no matter what Jon meant, it was true. “So make the most of it, alright?”

Jon’s brow goes down along with his voice. “I don’t like leaving you here alone.”

“Eh. When Elias frees me, I’ll catch up with Sasha and Martin. If Elias frees me.” Tim waves off his own instinct to pull a face. “Let the record show that I am a _fantastic_ wingman.”

Jon goes stock still. His shoulders rise as he pulls in a horrified breath, his eyes wide in what Tim hates to identify as realization. He reaches up a hand to hover above Tim’s elbow, and the hesitation to touch him doesn’t seem to be just because he’s trying to remember if he’d been bitten there.

“...Oh, _Tim,_ you—”

Tim cuts him off with a grin. “Don’t worry about it.”

“But—”

“I’m serious.” Tim reaches for the door to push it open. “Go get him, champ.”

There is a silence before Jon finally settles his hand on Tim’s arm. The squeeze is so careful and it still hurts, his fingertips only narrowly missing a sore spot that Tim refuses to broadcast. Not when Jon’s mouth has wobbled into a small smile, every bit as lopsided now as Tim’s is.

The smile serves as his _thank you_ before he ducks under Tim’s arm to step outside. Tim watches Jon check both sides of the street before he even reaches the top of the staircase to start walking down, before he turns around to face the lobby. His body affords him about two good deep breaths before the gravity of what he’s just done to himself hits with blinding force.

Oh, G-d _dammit._

At least seventy percent of the last half hour was completely unnecessary. There was no reason for Tim to have gone out of his way like that. Why did it have to matter that Jon looked nice for this? Why can’t he just root for them without wondering where this leaves him? 

Pathetic, honestly. He can’t even blame Jeff. No uni counselor in the world covers this type of convoluted shit. He has to figure out the logic on his own. 

It’s not like he has any real right to be hurt by it. He’d watched Jon go from academic to openly invested in real time the more statements they read and the more answers they didn’t get. It would be _indescribably_ shitty to wish Gerry had never turned up. Tim just sort of wishes he hadn’t gotten so carried away with contributing to his own inevitable erasure.

Oh, well. Nothing he can do about it now except hope it goes well. And he really, really does.

Tim glances past Rosie’s desk to the open mouth of the hallway that will surely lead to his _actual_ erasure from the living population. It’s almost surprising that Elias isn’t conveniently looming there, ready to creepily beckon for him to follow like Mister Corporate fucking Babadook. Tim can’t decide if it’s better or worse that he’ll have to make the conscious decision to walk into that office himself. Is that the decision he’d meant to leave Gerry with when he left him standing in the center of the lobby? 

Either way, there’s nowhere else for him to go. Tim has already decided that today would be the day he abandons cowardice. There’s no way to know what Elias is up to until he sees it for himself. Only one way to see if he’s really that big of a threat, or if he’s just an asshole around service animals.

And really, there’s always the hitman.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TRANSCRIPT OF GERRY'S NOTE: (thanks to parker @cuttlefishkitch for the triceratops doodle!)  
>  _"Sorry about this  
>  [doodle of a triceratops] — G"_
> 
> i bet y'all weren't expecting all this tim _and_ the sudden emergence of a larger plot, huh!
> 
> references for anyone who wants to draw gerry!  
> \+ [this is the dinosaur shirt](https://weheartit.com/entry/195158506)! (he was wearing _pink mesh under it_ for _g-d's sake._ pour one out for bi legend tim stoker.)  
> \+ [i also made him in some picrews! this is a good hair length reference.](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/623223358947000320/)  
> \+ and [here is his dog!](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/795528665352896522/795542099512262686/ophelia.png) she is a weimaraner/lab mix! shout-out to @IceEckos12 for inspiring her.
> 
> i'm working so rapidly with the reunion it's already got so much in it like i Promise it's every bit as tender as promised. i'm so close to done, it's just. massively long. like, 20k long.
> 
> comments and whatnot appreciated as always! and you can always yell at me on tumblr @[gerrydelano](http://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/), as well.


	16. make up leeway

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All of his plans to investigate the sides of the building and identify all the exits collapse into nothing when he realizes that Gerry is sitting on the steps not two yards in front of him.
> 
> He expected to have to play hide and seek. They’re not children anymore, though, and all of the games seem to finally be over.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SO much fanart this time! i'm so stunned and thankful, guys, really! here we have:  
> \+ [this adorable soft reunion gerry](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/623452903333593088) by @galaxyofoz that makes me cry!  
> \+ [this astounding reunion gerry](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/623277361174036480/) by @transmikecrew! done by trackpad! _trackpad!_ those _dinosaurs!_  
>  \+ [this precious reunion gerry](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/623278884672192512/) by @ofdreamsanddoodles! he's so sweet!  
> \+ [reunion gerry COSPLAY](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/623741452866994176)?! @casbutch you are the COOLEST.  
> \+ [gerry and his service dog](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/623302700011028480) by @treeroutes! the FASHION!  
> \+ [a collection of jon and gerry sketches](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/623234456085528576) by @littlerobinsart!  
> \+ and @boneroutes did [a redraw of their chapter 9 art](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/623847407370878976/)! simmy have i told you that i owe you my life
> 
> **CWs in the end notes**
> 
> suggested listening:  
> \+ [third eye - florence + the machine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e67laA_11NM)  
> \+ [everything i need - skylar grey](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3Qu6AgkUu0)
> 
> and now, the moment you have all been waiting so patiently for! let's hit it!

_make up leeway - to make up for time already lost or wasted_

───── ☆ ─────

He should have told the driver to let him out a block away. What sort of idiot has a taxi drop them off directly on the doorstep of the place they’re likely to be murdered behind once the car pulls away? Stupid. _Stupid._

Not that anyone would suspect a murder to take place in some random pub in Mitcham at 10:30 in the morning on a weekday, which means it’s probably equally as stupid to be thinking so hard about it. Or maybe that unlikelihood just means it’s the _perfect_ place for him to be killed, and he’s walked himself right into it.

Jon has a twenty-minute taxi ride to come to terms with the fact that it’s very likely this is some sort of trap. As much as he would love to believe Tim in all his encouragements, would love to believe that there’s no danger here, it’s all rather convenient, isn’t it?

Why would Gerry turn up _now?_ So soon after Prentiss, after Gertrude? How had he known where to find him? How _long_ has he known? How could stopping Tim in the lobby have been just a stroke of luck? Was it good luck, or bad? What investment could Elias _possibly_ have in this? With everything else going on?

The fact that Jon can’t obtain the answers through intense focus on the questions alone just means he’ll have to find them himself. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s taken a risk like this. It’s just the first time that he hopes to be proven wrong.

It feels foolish to hope at all. What else could possibly come out of this? Certainly nothing that Tim had been so confident about when he’d ushered him out the door. Jon curses Tim for stealing his elastic when he’d undone his hair. He’d done it to make sure Jon didn’t ruin it by putting it back up again, no doubt, but it also means that Jon has nothing to snap against his wrist in his anxiety. There is a restless weight turning over itself in his stomach. Not a stone but a struggling bird, wide-winged and trapped in the dark.

To occupy his hands, Jon opens up his bag to take out the notebook and flip to the very back. Unfolding the note again, he lays it flat against the page to compare warning and apology, disregarding childish flights of fancy. It’s hard to tell if the handwriting is exactly the same, but the lilting way the _t’s_ are crossed looks close enough, the little curving dot above each _i._

Jon has seen Tim’s attempts at forgery, and they don’t hold a candle to his skill with improv and verbal persuasion. For this to really be a trap, those skills would have all needed to be used in tandem. There’s no way he’s in on it, whatever this is. Wishful thinking might well have done them both in. They’ll just die for it in different rooms.

The GPS system on Jon’s phone follows along with the taxi driver’s, held in his lap so that he doesn’t have to peer up past the seats. Hopefully useful, actually. If anyone ever finds his phone, they’ll be able to see the last place he’d been. That should help, shouldn’t it? A record of his last known location, even if the only thing that knew it alongside him was some nebulous piece of technology that couldn’t call out to be found.

And Tim, of course. If he even remembers the address. If he’d even _processed_ it on the page. He was so fixated on the triceratops and the pink eyeshadow, he may have forgotten there was a whole point to this by now.

Which means that Jon is doomed, more or less.

The taxi slows to a stop.

Parked cars are lined up all along the curb, blocking the storefronts. There isn’t much traffic on the road itself, so no urgency in the taxi driver’s silent patience as he waits for Jon to hand him the fare. The urgency falls to Jon as he realizes that he hasn’t packed away the survival guide, or folded up the note, or stuck his phone back in his pocket. He scrambles for his cane; it had slipped from where he’d propped it against the leather seats.

He nudges the door shut with his elbow after stumbling out of the car, the weight of his bag displacing his balance. The rubber tip of his cane grinds against the asphalt before he has to catch himself on the trunk of the nearest car. The spike of panic in his heart at the idea of falling is quick to recede as he lifts his head to face the building, seeking out the sign that’ll confirm he’s in the right place. 

All of his plans to investigate the sides of the building and identify all the exits collapse into nothing when he realizes that Gerry is sitting on the steps not two yards in front of him.

He expected to have to play hide and seek. They’re not children anymore, though, and all of the games seem to finally be over. 

More than that, Jon expected Gerry to look just as tired as he feels about all this searching, to look troubled by this morning’s events. As Tim told it, Jon might have expected Gerry to look more worried. To be as terrified as he is that either of them might have been followed. That this would all go wrong.

But there’s a brightness to Gerry’s eyes when he sits himself up to grip the steps with both hands. His mouth flickers into a smile before it fades, and then flickers back like he wants to try harder to keep it there. His eyes stay wide and bright, though, and Jon has no idea what he could possibly say that would make up for how bewildered he probably looks in response. 

Gerry stands up and takes a half-step. He lingers close enough to the staircase to hold onto the guard rail, even as all of his body language loudly broadcasts his wish to move forward. Jon hovers in the space between parked cars until suddenly he’s on the pavement and moving closer, too, little by little.

Neither of them reach out for one another. There is no slow motion sprint across the width of the walkway, no ensemble cast to throw rose petals in their direction. There’s no dog in sight, either, which almost makes Jon wonder if Tim had been making that part up after all, but the slant in how Gerry distributes his weight speaks to a plausible need for one even if he’d come here alone. 

Gerry had come here alone, and left something that was meant to protect him behind somewhere. There is a deliberate vulnerability in the thought. It might even the playing field if Jon had ever taken a second to consider what game they would be playing in lieu of the most excruciating round of Marco Polo the world has ever seen, as Tim has called it.

“I—” Jon’s voice sticks in his throat. His body seems to think a nervous laugh is what it’ll take to knock it loose again, and he’s powerless to the impulse. Shaking his head does little to clear it, or stop his greeting from leaving him in a helpless exhale. “...Hi?”

“Hi,” Gerry repeats. The high register of his voice rings in Jon’s head like a bell, startling in its gentle clarity. Something whispers in his head that says Gerry hasn’t always sounded this way. Something that remembers precisely how Lesere Saraki had felt when he’d approved of her decision to let him kill a man. No one with a voice like this could inspire that much fear.

What surprises Jon the most is how little fear is left in him now that Gerry is standing right in front of him, even knowing of the things he’s done. He’s standing here not as a ghost, not a dream, and too at war with his own smile to be nursing a murder scheme. He looks like he’s trying to decide if he’s allowed to be happy or not. It might be easier for him if Jon would smile back, but Jon has had enough trouble feeling the finer motions of his own face for the past month that he can’t be sure what it’s doing.

Instead, Jon glances to either side of him for passersby. “Are, um— should we go get a table inside?”

“Not if we don’t want an audience,” Gerry sighs. “I’ve usually got eyes on me.”

Jon pauses. “Is… I’m sorry, was that a pun?” 

“An accurate one.” A slanted smile, no show of teeth, before he turns his head to study the left side of the street. “You’ll get used to it.”

“Wh—” Jon blinks at him, the question fading into breath. Were it not for the intonation there, he might’ve mistaken Gerry’s phrasing for a malapropism. _“I’ll_ get used to it?”

Gerry turns back to him, lower lip slipping from the trap of his teeth. “Not here,” he says. “I’ll explain everything, but we have to get out of range.”

“Out of—? Out of range of _what?”_ Jon sputters. The urge to step backwards finally hits. Instead, Jon steps ahead to cut off Gerry’s path when he starts walking to the right, demanding explanation with a pleading shake of his head. Gerry’s brow creases.

“Did the guy who gave you the note not explain why this is dangerous?”

Jon straightens up. “I… I-I’m led to believe you didn’t even explain to _him_ why this is dangerous.”

Gerry nods, accepting the oversight. “I’ll explain to you when we get where we’re going.”

_“Where?”_

“Hey, no.” Gerry turns to face him suddenly, head inclined. “You can’t do that while we’re out here. Don’t ask questions. If I just _tell_ you, it defeats the purpose of the decoy.” He faces forward to keep walking, next words more a mutter. “It’s bad enough Elias knows it was a decoy in the first place.”

Jon hurries to keep from falling behind. “How would he know?”

“Jon, please.” Nearly a whisper. “I know it’s a lot to ask, but I need you to trust me.”

One last leap of faith, and then it’ll all make sense. Jon can do that. He agrees with intentional silence, glancing over his shoulder to scan the buildings they pass by.

He’s already hovering quite close to Gerry’s side. The instinct to all but glue himself to people and cling to their arms hasn’t completely left him since he got in the habit during uni. The sleeve of Gerry’s jacket is pinched between Jon’s fingers before he registers that his hand had snapped out in response to Gerry stumbling on a lift in the pavement.

The lull in their step doesn’t last long. Jon looks down at where he’s anchored his hand, quietly stunned by his sudden reluctance to let go. Gerry doesn’t shake him off, his elbow pointed slightly towards him as if to accept the aid. Words wouldn’t serve much purpose.

“Alright,” Gerry says eventually. “Coming in on the head rush. Get ready.”

“Head rush…?” Jon repeats. “Wh—?”

Gerry cuts him off with a sideways glare. No heat, only warning, and then it passes.

“Despite what it says on the tin, I’m not actually interested in feeding the Eye.” Jon stares hard at his profile, the tattoo at the joint of his jaw that moves like it’s blinking when he speaks. Gerry tilts his head closer to whisper even as he stares straight ahead. “Doesn’t see too well in the dark.” 

Jon’s brow sinks so low it almost aches. “You _do_ realize this is the textbook definition of ‘suspicious.’”

Another breath of a laugh. “It’s about as close as ‘safe’ gets. You just happen to be on the enemy side of things, so it might have a weird effect on you.”

“Enemy—?”

“Jon, no questions until we get inside. Just hold onto me.”

The warning doesn’t lessen the shock of sudden blindness.

It’s like a bucket of freezing water thrown into his face, his vision clipping like a severed film strip. His startled inhalation drags with it sand-fine flecks of false hail, foretelling of a cruel winter. Colourless spots pop in the dense shadow as Jon strains to see ahead of him. He grasps for Gerry’s arm, gait stuttering.

Panic lances through him when Gerry starts to tug his arm away. His eyes shut tight: this is when the fall comes, the hard landing on concrete before he can catch himself, the rolling ankle, the knee twice taken apart. He waits for the gritty embrace of the pavement.

It doesn’t come. Before Jon can process rejection, there is a warm hand clasped around his, and it doesn’t feel like anything but rescue. He clutches at it tightly, forcing his eyes open and into focus as he staggers to a stop. As swiftly as the shadow swept him up, it lets him go.

“Alright?”

Jon’s hand rises to his forehead. “What the hell _was_ that?”

Gerry is angled closely to him, bracing him by the shoulder. He sighs again like it’s the only way he knows how to exhale anymore.

“Just about the only useful thing Gertrude ever gave me.” His next words are equal parts factual and affectionate. “Nobody will find us here, if they’re looking too hard.”

That’s too many things to pull apart all at once. Jon hears the helpless noise of confusion trip out of his mouth before he remembers making it. For a moment, Gerry looks sympathetic.

“Sorry,” he says, just shy of sheepish. “That question was fine, so you should be good to ask more. While we walk, though. Here.”

Gerry nudges his cane back into the hand not still tightly laced with his. Jon can’t recall when he’d let go of it in the first place. He takes it from him, recalibrating his grip on the handle before he even considers taking another step forward.

“How—?” Jon swallows roughly, eyes darting wildly around them. The street looks no different than it had a moment ago. There is no detectable holographic sheen behind him when he turns around to check, no transparent side of a half-silvered mirror. “Wh-What _actually_ was that? As in, what’s it for?”

“We need to be able to talk without someone listening in. Or looking, rather.” Gerry scoffs out a laugh next, the corner of his mouth tweaked with a smile. “Only reason it doesn’t knock _my_ lights out is because I’m the one with a hand on the switch.”

“So— So, it’s a barrier?” Jon reasons. “A-Against what? You said before, I’m on the… the _enemy side_ of things?”

Gerry hasn’t stepped away from him yet. He makes a slight face.

“We should be sitting down somewhere before I get into that part. Let’s keep moving.”

Jon scans the street again. There’s nothing to dwell on out here that he can see. Frowning, he nods, and Gerry resumes his careful lead. Jon doesn’t last very long in silence before he has to ask another question, for lack of anything else to voice.

“You knew Gertrude?”

“Yep,” Gerry says, like there’s nothing incriminating about that fact.

“When was the last time you saw her?”

It doesn’t come out as frantic or accusatory as it might have if Jon had thought to ask ten minutes ago, or if Gerry had managed to get down to the Archives this morning himself. The suspicion he’s trying to scrounge up feels thin and ineffective. It doesn’t convince him to pull his hand away, even as Gerry’s first response to the question is a clipped series of snickers. Instead, Jon grips his hand tighter to stop him from walking.

Gerry doesn’t look bothered. He indulges Jon’s incredulous stare for a moment before stepping gently forward again, urging Jon to follow along. He doesn’t answer the question.

“She had this talent, suppose you could say. For making people just spill their guts, even if they didn’t want to. Not often, never on me. I’m not interested in knowing what it feels like.”

Jon considers the request Gerry has needed to repeat so many times since they started walking, considers his phrasing. “I’m… assuming that she did this through asking questions.”

He shakes his head, still smiling vaguely. “That’s the most I know about it. Good news is I don’t think it works in here. We’re almost there.”

The sign reads _Misfit Ink,_ and Jon could swear it hadn’t been there before. It sticks out enough that he should have been able to see it from at least a few buildings back. When had it appeared there? No, no, it _had_ been there before. Jon just hadn’t been able to make out the words on the sign, the shape of it. His eyes had skipped right over it.

The uncertainty stems from that barrier, and Jon finds himself wanting to hate it for the illusion, but now he just has more questions. How far did it stretch? What’s it made of, exactly? How did Gerry put it in place, how does he control it, _why_ was Jon the only one affected by it? Who is it really meant to ward out? Why is a tattoo parlour poised at the epicenter?

“How do people find this place if they just want a tattoo?”

“Most people don’t have magic eyes.”

Gerry stops in front of a door set in between the shop and the one that came before it, reaching for the doorknob. He doesn’t turn it just yet, holding onto it for balance. “Flat’s up here. If you don’t want to take the stairs, there’s a back room. We’d just have to pass my boss.”

That’s one question answered, and a new one conjured. Perhaps it’s redundant, but it’s in the air before Jon can regret it.

“You’re a tattoo artist?”

Another smile, shy as much as almost proud. “Soon to be. Still an apprentice.” Gerry leans his shoulder against the door. “Little weird to get paid by your own flatmate just so you can give it back for the rent, though, will say.”

It would probably be smarter to choose the open business establishment. Jon can see people inside, a cloud of black curls only barely obscuring a man’s wincing face as he laughs at the pain of a needle. Witnesses, and all that. Someone to know he had been here, to corroborate the story if he were to disappear.

Unless they were in on it, too, of course. That would pose its own problem. It isn’t so much that Jon has calculated whether or not he could take Gerry in a fight if need be — he is confident he couldn’t, even with the way he’s trying to mask his shortness of breath — but it would most certainly be harder to face a group of people.

Except that Gerry isn’t doing a very good job masking his shortness of breath. Would it be kinder, then, to choose the back room? Less distance to walk? But Gerry is still gripping the doorknob and staring right at him and his eyes are as clear as his preference. All of this work put into hiding for such an open book. Just to give Jon the choice.

So, Jon makes a choice.

“If you think you can make it, I’ll be fine going up.”

Gerry breathes out a sigh of relief. “Hope you like dogs.”

A low bark resound from the top of the steps when the door swings open, nails clicking on the floor. Jon peers over Gerry’s shoulder, squinting into the shadowed stairwell. He can distinguish the canine silhouette behind a short, plastic baby gate, but something else seems to be skittering around its feet before it disappears from view altogether.

Gerry doesn’t start up the stairs just yet. He leans over the chairlift folded up on the left side of the stairwell to grip onto the bannister instead, wilting towards the wall. Jon steps closer to him, half-tugged by their linked hands, concern plucking at something deep in his chest.

“Are you alright?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Gerry huffs, finally undoing his hand from Jon’s to press at his heart with his fingertips. “Just a mi— a minute, I think. I’m okay.”

Jon frowns at the curl of his back. He glances between the staircase and over his shoulder out at the street, the warmth of the building on his one side and his other left in the cool autumn. The loss of Gerry’s hand leaves him wanting, but he doesn’t know how to ask.

Gerry spots his hesitation with mild irritation. “I’m really fine.”

“I know,” Jon says quickly, “I know that. It’s just— Um… Gerry, could I—?”

Jon drops his eyes to the ground, withdrawing backwards. Gerry pushes away from the wall to lean into his space a bit, tipping his head to get into his line of sight. Jon looks back up in time to see the flicker of cautious joy cross his face.

“...What, were you going to ask for a hug?”

Stiffly, Jon nods. “I-I just— I just thought, since we’re standing here.”

Jon hears the smile in Gerry’s voice before he looks up again and sees it. “I mean, I wouldn’t be sad about it.” 

This doorway is narrow. There isn’t all that much space between them. He doesn’t know who takes the first half-step forward, but he almost hopes that it was him. That he was brave enough to bridge that gap.

Not that it matters. His shoulders scream with resistance to the press of the door jamb along his spine when their balance leaves him backed up against it, the damage there still sensitive to direct pressure. It’s nothing he’ll ruin this for.

Gerry drops his head onto his shoulder like he hasn’t lain it down in all his life. Any nerve in Jon’s arms that protests circling so tightly around him is silenced by the way Gerry clings back to his waist. Any breath Jon may have tried to hold is shaken out of him by the way Gerry sighs against his neck, the sheer relief in it no less tangible than the goosebumps that rise in its wake.

Jon shuts his eyes, burying his face against Gerry’s collarbone. The smell of perfume on him is stronger from this close, floral and sweet. It’s so gentle that Jon’s throat closes up with some odd form of yearning he’s spent years unwilling to name.

“Okay,” Gerry murmurs, after a time. “Usually ‘falling asleep standing up’ ends badly for me.”

Jon’s laugh is muffled in his jacket. “Right. Right, we should go upstairs.”

“In a second.”

“Okay,” Jon agrees. “Just a second.”

Gerry’s nose skims the hollow of his cheek when he straightens up and away, his face lit up diagonally by the sunlight slanting through the doorway. Jon registers the glittering particles in his eye makeup on the one side before he faces the shadow of the stairwell again, releasing a slow breath. Jon retrieves his cane from where he’d propped it against the wall.

“Ophelia,” Gerry calls out, patting his thigh for a summoning sound. “Here, girl.”

The dog hops over the short gate and trots down the steps like she had been waiting at the top, panting happily and nuzzling at Gerry’s open hand when he reaches out. She’s silver, like Tim had reported, but there’s no vest and no tension in her body language at all.

“...Ophelia?” Jon repeats. “Not Shakespeare, surely.”

“Would you believe me if I said that’s how they named the whole litter?”

Gerry asks it with a smile, a little weak with sincerity, and Jon believes him.

“And if it makes you feel any better,” Gerry huffs, starting up the staircase. “The ferret’s called Tortellini.”

A bit awkwardly, Ophelia twists herself around in the small space in front of Gerry’s legs to face the staircase again, climbing up a few steps ahead of him so that he can rest his hand between her shoulder blades without needing to bend. Jon steps inside, pulling the door shut behind him with one last look out at the street.

“Why not use this?” he asks of the folded chairlift. Gerry makes a dismissive sound.

“Not that far a climb,” he tells him. “All yours, though, if you need.”

“No,” Jon answers quickly. “No, I’m quite alright.”

It doesn’t take a genius. If Jon was overcome with humiliation at the prospect, of course Gerry would prefer to lean on his dog in front of company. In front of him.

Jon wonders if that should make him sad, or similar. It’s too soon to wonder if either of them will ever know better.

He reaches for the bannister, too, once there’s room on the lower steps. “If you’re walking, so am I.”

Gerry laughs so much more than Jon remembers or imagined. “Your dadima would be so pissed.”

In spite of himself, Jon laughs a little, too. “Yes, I think she would.”

The climb isn’t so torturous. Gerry makes immediate headway for the nearest couch, collapsing onto one side of it with a satisfying _fwump_ that makes Jon realize all at once how much his own legs have started to ache. Jon lowers himself down more carefully beside him, scooting to lean back without slumping near as much, his cane rested against the arm of the couch behind him and his bag shrugged off onto the ground.

Ophelia hangs around Gerry’s feet until he’s wrestled his jacket off. He folds it in half to toss it onto the armchair nearby and gives her a quiet command, pointing across the room. Jon watches her run off towards a plastic cooler, nosing it open to root around inside it, before the mysterious, skittering creature from before tumbles into view and snags his focus. A ferret, mostly dark brown with mask-like markings strapped across its tiny face. He stops a distance from the couch to stare at Jon, not yet approaching but still producing a series of curious squeaking noises.

“Oh! Hello, uh, Tortellini.”

Gerry snickers openly. “Alright, Mario.”

Jon faces him with the intent of projecting exasperation only to find himself captivated by Ophelia again as she places a water bottle in Gerry’s waiting hand, dripping with cold condensation. Gerry holds it towards him in offer.

“Want this one?”

Jon holds up a hand. “No, you go right ahead.”

“Phelie,” Gerry says, pointing to the cooler again. “Water, one more.”

She seems all too pleased to rush off again and repeat her task, trotting back to the far end of the room. Gerry untwists the cap and manages to down half the bottle before coming back up for air, renewed relief washing over him so visibly that Jon is almost envious. He and Tim had only managed step one this morning. He doesn’t always need all three steps these days, but he’d left his tea on his desk.

When Ophelia returns to them with a bottle of ranch dressing held between her teeth, Gerry doubles over to laugh more openly than he has yet. Jon bites his lips together to refrain from the same, though he couldn’t place why if asked.

“I know there’s more water in there, you dope,” Gerry tells her. “Go get a _water.”_

“Is she still in training?” Jon asks, bubbles popping in his lungs until he gives in to a chuckle. Ophelia runs off again, back to the cooler for her next attempt, Gerry still smiling helplessly after her. 

“I got her through this program that taught her how to sniff out whether I’m going to keel over,” he explains. “Took a year of waiting and mailing in all sorts of cotton swabs. All that superdog stuff, she’s got down to a science. Then I ask for my meds and she brings me the clicker.”

It’s clear in Gerry’s face that he doesn’t consider the mistakes to be anything but a reason to love her more. Ophelia returns to them with the desired bottle and Gerry wipes it off on his trouser leg before handing it off to Jon, patting his palm dry next before taking her face in both hands.

“It isn’t your fault,” he tells her. “It’s Joy’s for putting ranch in my bloody cooler. Yes, it is.”

“Joy?” Jon asks after he’s taken a long sip. “Is that your boss?”

Gerry shakes his head. “Boss’ fiancée. Fridge must have been full last time they came back with groceries. She cooks a lot, so it’s usually pretty packed.”

Gerry holds the bottle of ranch back out to Ophelia, pointing again to the cooler to tell her to put it back. When she returns with nothing in her mouth this time, it’s only in search of more attention. When she turns to Jon and sniffs at his knee, Jon freezes mid-gulp.

“It’s okay, you can pet her.” Gerry finishes off his water bottle with impressive speed, setting the empty plastic down on the little table nearby. “She’s off the clock.”

With Ophelia’s cheek nuzzled insistently into the curve of his palm, Jon remembers what Tim had said about how she had been when he first saw her in the lobby. With her cold, soft nose pressed sweetly to the inside of his wrist, Jon reasons that this is more likely to be her default reaction to strangers, and that Elias must have triggered something very sincerely frightened in her to so badly disrupt her working neutrality.

“What actually happened with Elias this morning?” Jon asks, the suddenness of the topic change not quite registering until he sees Gerry’s posture shift. “Tim said he caught the tail end, but I still have no idea what’s really going on.”

Gerry rests his elbow on his knee, bending forward to wiggle his fingers at the ferret when he finally comes close enough to the couch to be touched. “I have to go back a little further than this morning for it to make sense.”

“I sort of expected that,” Jon scoffs. “I’m just— hearing that you were right there, had— had _been_ at the Institute before, enough that Elias knew who you were, it just… it sits wrong with me that I never knew.”

Gerry nods. “I’ve got a theory about that. I didn’t know you worked there until the last day I set foot in the building, before I checked in and was told you were on medical leave.”

Jon chooses to ignore the latter half of that and focus on the first. “Which was when, exactly?”

“‘Round October,” he says. “2014.”

Jon’s fingers go still behind Ophelia’s ears. “I’m sorry, _2014?”_

Gerry purses his lips, eyes stuck to the floor. “Bumped into you on the way in from the courtyard. You dropped your book.”

The room tilts. Jon grips at the cushions for balance, even as he’s still so firmly seated. “That— That was _you?_ You— A-And you knew, you knew who I was and you didn’t—?”

“You were in a piss mood,” Gerry interjects. “And I was in a hurry.”

“And I was _right in front of you!”_

Jon wishes he hadn’t nearly shouted the words. Ophelia jerks back a fraction, wary, and makes an agitated sound. Gerry shushes her from the distance, his hand cradled around the ferret’s face as he chirps as if to join in with all the noise. Guilt churns in Jon’s chest at the sight of the dog recoiling from him, horror at the idea of losing her trust so soon.

She comes back towards his open hand, forgiving, once it’s quiet again. Like it hadn’t happened. Like it was just a mistake that set nothing in stone. Jon’s throat burns.

“I’m sorry.” Gerry sits up to look at him, his mouth a subdued downward slope. “I promise it’s not what you think.”

Jon lets go of the breath he’d started holding to rein himself in. “What, that— that you _knew,_ all this time, a-and, and did nothing?”

For a fraction of a second, Gerry looks profoundly wounded. It only shows so much as his eyes pinching faintly at the corners, but Jon can see it. He’s finally caught him off guard. It’s then that Jon realizes exactly how little control over this situation he must really have for such an oblique strike of disarmament to feel like a victory.

Gerry has been smiling so much, breezing through the parts of this that Jon couldn’t navigate on his own. He’d gone out of his way to dress up for the occasion because he had the time to think about it. He’s so calm because he’s had all the time in the world to prepare for this day, while Jon had to be pieced together bit by bit by his co-worker on his way out the door with no warning.

It feels wrong to feel cheated when Gerry is looking at him like that, but that’s always what made the pendant around his neck feel so heavy. If not now, Jon may never get to voice it.

“I was on my way out of the country,” Gerry tries. Not quite pleading, yet. “But I promised myself, the second I realized it was you, I’d talk to you once I got back to England. I really thought I’d be back in a week.”

“Why didn’t you, then?” Ophelia whines when Jon’s hands fall from her head, turning back towards Gerry for compensation. “How long were you there?”

Gerry strokes her face once she’s in reach, but takes a moment to usher her across the room with a pointed finger. Easily enough, she departs. Jon hadn’t seen the ferret leave, busy searching Gerry’s expression for something that might give him answers should he elect to keep any more secrets.

“Six months, give or take.”

“Why?” Jon presses. “What was overseas?”

“Nothing I’d gone there looking for.” Gerry twists a bit to pop something in his spine, but he stays leaning forward over his knees. “Lot of things I really needed, though.”

Impatience scrapes at the walls of Jon’s stomach. “Such _as?”_

“Surgery, for one. Radiation.” Gerry lifts his head now to look up, quickly glancing over Jon’s face before the eye contact breaks again. “Friends.”

Jon’s lungs seize up with regret. He doesn’t know if there’s enough apology in his eyes to count for anything, but the words lodge in his throat like an arrow. 

Gerry must have had plenty of time to prepare for this part of the conversation, too. His hesitation takes on two forms; the skittish glance for himself, and the placating break between words for Jon. There’s no one else it could be for. He picks up again when Jon loosens his jaw, a short nod given in request for what comes after.

“Technically I’m in remission, but the sort of tumor I had doesn’t much like to stay dead for long. I thought I killed it before I went.” A shrug now, almost unbothered. “I was wrong.”

“That’s—” Jon shakes his head, clearing his throat. “Gerry, I had no idea.”

Gerry finally laughs again. “Yeah, that was the point. That was the plan.”

Jon couldn’t have expected the pain that blossoms in his chest. “You mean the plan you made with my grandmother to keep me in the dark about everything, like— like I couldn’t handle it, o-or that I’d ever judge you?”

“The plan I made with your grandmother to not die before I hit thirty.”

This is the closest that Gerry’s eyes have come yet to hardening. His voice, too, even in the still-softness of its volume. The guilt is immediate and Jon had expected it before he even got the words out, but for all of the time that Gerry had to pull himself together for this, Jon has had none. Trying to find Gerry from scratch wasn’t the same as having all the information and waiting until the proper moment to do something with it.

It feels all the more unfair now, sitting here next to him and feeling in waves how immensely unprepared for this he really was. All the daydreaming in the world hadn’t offered him the possibility that Gerry was sicker than dadima ever knew. That he’d had so much more to battle after leaving her.

“I’m sorry,” Jon gasps out. He hadn’t realized he’d locked in his breath. “I don’t mean to— I don’t mean to blame you, that’s not—”

“I know,” Gerry says. “I get it.”

“Do you, though?” Jon’s shoulders drop. “I looked so hard for you, Gerry, all that time. If you’d called, or— or written a letter, maybe, _anything—”_

“Called where, Jon?” Gerry interrupts. “Where would I have sent a letter? To the Institute? You think the line wouldn’t have been mysteriously cut? That Elias wouldn’t have just torn up the envelope?”

“You still haven’t explained _why_ he would!” Jon doesn’t want to sound this desperate. He should pay more attention to the water bottle growing warm in his hand before he tips himself back over the ledge he’d been doing handstands on this morning. 

Gerry starts to run a hand through his hair before he seems to remember that the top half of it is tied up too firmly to accommodate his fingers. He smooths his palm over it instead, fiddling with the tiny ponytail at the back of his head when he reaches it.

“I don’t know why he would. I’ve never met him until today.”

“What? Tim said he threatened your _life,_ why would he do that if he didn’t know you?”

Gerry’s hand slips to the back of his neck, his eyes peering past the bend of his arm. “I don’t have to have met him for him to know me. I worked with Gertrude. That was enough to get his attention, even if he hadn’t known my parents.”

“Your _parents?”_ How deep does this go? How many threads tangle around the pillars of that building, invisible to the ignorant eye? Further interruptions of horror and dread collect in Jon’s gut as gnarled nesting material for the fidgeting bird there, with no hope of painless extrication. He drops the water bottle onto the cushion beside him in favour of gripping at his knees.

“Gertrude’s the important bit.” Gerry looks back down at the floor. “It’s more because of her that I took so long to even consider going anywhere near the Institute again.”

Jon has let enough questions leave him unchecked. He has no right to give Gerry a temper when he’s trying so hard to be quiet. Or has this always been his genuine baseline, even now that they’re older? Jon doesn’t ask. He waits, instead, for Gerry to continue on his own.

It takes a moment longer this time. Gerry sniffs, sitting back against the cushions finally. The movement seems to displace the way his lungs settled in his chest, another moment afforded to calibrating his breath before he speaks to the ceiling.

“I’d gone overseas with her, for her work. I’d be kind and wager she just couldn’t handle watching me have a seizure right in front of her, but Gertrude had a strong stomach. More than that, she had a flight to catch.”

Jon forgets how to breathe. “She… she left you there?”

Gerry nods, tight-lipped. “I never heard from her again. She never answered any of my calls, and it got embarrassing to keep it up. Like… I was really nothing to her, even after they’d scooped out as much of it as they could.”

And then he looks confused, his brow furrowed at the center.

“I don’t actually remember what the last conversation we had was,” Gerry says, before rolling his eyes. “I think maybe something about how stupid it was of me to skip out on so many of my radiation appointments over the summer. I’d picked the thirty-day option for a reason and all, thought it'd be over quicker.” 

His jaw trembles through his next hesitation. “They put this... freaky, plastic-mesh mask on you. Bolts your bloody head to the table. At least the _cancer_ I could ignore, if I tried. I already had crappy balance.” He shakes his head a few too many times. “That’s where I drew my line, though, the mask. I couldn’t do it. Which was stupid of me, because I had to if I wanted to live.”

Suddenly, it feels wrong to not be touching him. Jon traces the diameter of the space between them, contemplating the reach of his arm, before Gerry covers his face with both hands. Jon’s heart constricts and he bolts upright, ready to extend a hand before he realizes that Gerry is laughing again, this time hardly making a sound.

“Sorry,” he says, dropping his hands to reveal a smile. “See? You didn’t even have to ask me. It’s just what comes out.”

“Gerry,” Jon starts to say, because what else is there? Gerry lets his head loll against the cushion behind him, his eyes crinkled at the corners now with more amusement and melancholy than Jon has ever seen coexisting in someone’s face as one expression.

“It’s fine, that was my fault. Got distracted.”

Jon’s hands lift in helpless gestures. “And with good reason, I’d say? I— I think I’ve sorely misrepresented what it is I need to hear from you, so let me just set the record straight.”

Gerry’s face falls a fraction, almost out of respect. Jon clears his throat, and his head.

“I’m not just asking for you to paraphrase the timeline. Even if what comes to mind is a bad memory, don’t think you need to hold back for my comfort, or because you think I don’t care to know what you’ve been through. I-I do! I just— it’s a lot to process. I-I have so many questions? And for a long time, none of them were as terrifying as the ones I only realized I had this morning. It’s always been just wanting to know you. I still want that, Gerry, even if I’m scared enough to… pressure you into telling me about Gertrude, and Elias, and that barrier outside.”

The silent laughter resumes. Gerry presses his forefingers under each eye, dabbing at the waterlines as if there’s a risk of tears that’ll ruin his makeup.

“G-d,” he breathes, “Sorry. Alright, of course. I’m almost done with the Gertrude bit, anyway. Leads right into this morning. I’m getting there.”

“Take your time,” Jon says. He eventually decides that it might be helpful if he were to settle back and uncap his water again, to slowly sip it and keep his mouth busy with something other than interrupting and redirecting. Gerry considers his words before beginning again.

“It took me months to actually remember the flashing lights through the curtains before I went down. And maybe I’d buy that all she read were the warning signs I gave her if we ever _talked_ about it, but we didn’t. She just called them in advance. I know she told them where the stupid tumor was, or they might not have figured it out fast enough to get me into the OR, which I suppose means she at least wanted to give me a chance.” 

Not heartbroken, or betrayed, or convinced. Just observing, doing the math like he’s been doing the same problem for years and has been getting different answers every time.

“So, I don’t know if all that’s what saved me, or if it was the few hits of radiation I’d managed before. In which case, I owe it more to your dadima.” Gerry tilts his head more, cheek to his shoulder. “I’d really rather thank your dadima.”

Jon nods, eyes falling to his hands in his lap. “Yes, I… she might have given just about anything to see you like this, I think.”

Gerry quiets. “I tried calling her, too. When I was in America.”

Jon’s head snaps up. “Oh. Gerry, she—”

“Oh, I know. I figured when the little robot told me the line was disconnected.” Gerry shifts to drag a knee up onto the couch, turning sideways to face Jon more directly. “Had a feeling beforehand. But I guess sometimes you just need to sit in the kitchen and call two old women back-to-back to really get perspective on why neither of them will pick up the phone.”

After a moment, he drops his face against the cushion to stifle a snort. “Which sounds way more depressing out loud than I thought it would. Jeez. Sorry.”

“I… don’t really know that it could have possibly sounded any other way, if I’m being honest?” In spite of himself, Jon is smiling, too. There’s a distinct lack of overt grief in the air around the subject. It isn’t the time to talk about it yet.

“I know,” Gerry says, lifting his head. “But I’m not trying to be dramatic or anything. It’s just how things shook out.”

“I know,” Jon repeats. “Gertrude, though?”

“Right, yeah.”

Gerry stretches back against the arm of the couch behind him, drawing his hands together to play with the splint on his little finger.

“Just because Gertrude had helped me away from my mum didn’t mean I was really _free,_ you know. Just got transferred to a slightly bigger cage with a different obstacle course. I guess her leaving me behind was the equivalent of leaving the door open and inviting the stupid gerbil to go get lost somewhere in the house.”

Water nearly sloshes into Jon’s windpipe. He waves a hand for Gerry to continue as he coughs himself correct again. Only when he’s recovered does Gerry sit back and accept the cue, the little furrow of his brow so painfully fond that Jon could choke on his heart next if he didn’t want to hear the end of the story.

“So, I took the chance to get out. Stay out, ‘til I went totally stir crazy. I hated having to learn how to be sick, but I don’t know if I’d ever have learned how to do anything close to healing if I hadn’t. I think I needed it, in some backwards way. It was sort of a crash course on how people actually work when they’re not… where I’ve always been, and whatnot.”

“Why did you even come back?” Jon finally asks. “If you were doing well over there, if you were— if you were out, if you were healing.”

“First of all, fuck the American healthcare system.” Gerry points a finger. “You don’t miss the NHS until it’s gone.”

Alright, stupid question. Jon closes his eyes to mask the way they roll. That wasn’t quite what he’d meant to ask. It’s hard to calibrate when it feels like he’s opened up a book to a page in the very center, unable to flip to the beginning and read it linearly. Jon deliberately tamps down rising inquiry about Gerry’s mother, hinging on the hope that he’ll have enough time with him to eventually understand.

“If you only spent six months in America since the fall of 2014… you’ve been back here for a year and a half. You didn’t… catch wind of Gertrude’s disappearance? They— they don’t _talk_ in your… circles, do you even have circles? I don’t know how it works.”

“We do have circles, but I do my best to avoid them.” Gerry rubs a thumb along a patch of discolouration on the back of his opposite hand, absent. “I told you. I tried to keep out of it. Think when a Jehovah’s Witness knocks on your door, and you pretend you’re not home.”

Jon sighs, nodding along. “Except the Jehovah’s Witness wants to eat you.”

An approving grin, even as Gerry shakes his head. “That’s just a normal Jehovah’s Witness. The one in my allegory could get away with it.”

“That’s also a normal Jehovah’s Witness.”

The deadpan is enough to draw a sharp laugh. “Alright, I could have used a better allegory.”

The sharp laugh draws a swell of pride. Jon kneads at the feeling of that wide-winged bird flapping around in his stomach. An albatross, now, yawning and attempting comfort. “I understood what you meant.”

Gerry centers himself with a quick breath and meets eyes with Jon as both of their smiles fade. The conversation feels like rolling up and down a shoreline.

“You were really that afraid of going back to the Institute?” Jon asks. “Just… on the off chance you would run into Gertrude?”

There’s the pleading. The dread in his eyes. It’s quiet, but it’s there.

“It would have felt like crawling, you know? Begging for her to notice me. Did that enough with my mum. Never did have the strongest grasp on dignity.” This attempt at smiling fails. His mouth trembles like a bruise. “What really scared me out of trying was the idea of her actually wanting me back.”

Jon hadn’t known Gertrude, not really. Not enough to feel such intense hatred towards her all of a sudden. Then again, he hadn’t known Gerry. Not really. Not enough to love him so much as he thinks he might have to in order for that hatred to make any sense.

It might make sense to reach for Gerry’s hand if they were perhaps sitting across from one another at a table. From here, the distance is too great to feel natural in trying. The simplest solution that Jon can think of is to pull his own legs up onto the cushion separating them, joining Gerry’s in a criss-cross of ankles hanging over the edge. Gerry watches the overlap take place in relative silence. A long moment passes before he shifts to press his shin more deliberately against Jon’s, harsh bones sliding together like a bow to cello strings before settling still.

It feels like acceptance of something. Effort, maybe. Apology. It’ll have to be enough, for now.

“I think I understand,” Jon ventures. “That’s as good a reason as any to leave the place alone, I’d say.”

“I was procrastinating,” Gerry corrects him, blunt and level. “At first, yeah, I thought she was just there the whole time. Maybe found someone else to mule around. Couldn’t use her as an excuse anymore after seeing on the news they’d found her dead.”

Jon can’t recall the details of what had been shared through local media. He knows he’s watched it flicker across his television plenty of times while he was stuck at home, stewing and scratching and drawing up maps. The words aren’t resurfacing now, and it itches; did they disclose that she was shot? How long she’d been rotting, undiscovered? Had they tried to give a cover story for the worms, or had that just gone entirely unspoken? 

What has Gerry been thinking about the scars? The bandage on Jon’s temple, under the right corner of Tim’s mouth? Will _Gerry_ have questions for him when this is over, or is Jon’s side of things less important?

“Why today, though?” Jon asks instead of any of that. “How long did you wait, exactly? I don’t know when they stopped circulating her story.”

“Like I said, I was told you were out on medical and to come back in a month. I wasn’t about to ask Rosie for your home address. That would have been creepy, for one, and I had no idea if you were in any state to have some random person show up and say, _by the way, I got sober for you.”_

The restless bird in Jon’s stomach becomes sharply aware of its containment again and starts to fight. Gerry is smudging at a tattoo on his knuckle, a feeble upturn to his mouth that begs to be ignored. The certainty in his confessions seems to be determined by whether or not he thinks he’s confessing to a crime.

“...Me?” Jon repeats. “I— Oh.”

“Yeah.” Barely above a whisper. “Sorry. I know.”

Jon frowns. “Sorry for what?”

“I don’t know,” Gerry shrugs. “Saying it like that, I guess. It’s not too much?”

“I… I’m not sure I’m the person to ask. I’ve been wearing your necklace for five years.”

Gerry lifts his head, his eyes flickering between Jon’s face and his chest. Jon keeps his posture; he’d been wrong before, he thinks. Gerry had given up control a long time ago. Jon refuses to misuse it.

“I wasn’t sure if you broke it out just for the occasion,” Gerry smiles, cautious. “Surprised you kept it.”

Jon reaches up to catch the stone between his fingertips, rubbing his thumb along the edge of a claw. “I feel sort of wrong if I’m not wearing it.”

It isn’t a commitment as strong as sobriety. Jon isn’t sure what to do with the idea that the confessions bear even remotely similar weight, but Gerry looks more at ease for having heard his. It must not matter what stock Jon puts into it, if it soothes him.

Jon chases levity with a scoffing outbreath. “Tim had a _field day_ when I told him what it was.”

Gerry perks up a bit. “Is that the guy from this morning?”

“Quite. He—” Jon curls forward with a snort, shaking his head. “Alright, I actually think you’d appreciate this story. Do you want to know something embarrassing?”

Gerry grins. “More embarrassing than anything I’ve said so far?”

“Infinitely,” Jon agrees, steeling himself. “Around the Archives, we— well, since before we got down there, actually. Back in research, when I first told him about you, he insisted we give the endeavour to find you some ridiculous code name, you know, _Operation This, Operation That,_ so on _._ It was incredibly cheesy, but I— I-I regret to inform you that your name has been ‘Gerry Dawson’ for the better part of the last few years.”

The face Gerry makes is priceless. “Why Dawson?”

“After— After Jack, from _Titanic.”_

“Oh, my G-d,” Gerry winces. “That’s such a bad omen. He _freezes to death.”_

Jon shakes his head, hands waving. Grinning hurts the left side of his face. “That isn’t why, I promise. It was more to make fun of me, because _Operation Heart of the Sea_ was too cumbersome.”

Gerry laughs. “You sure? Because Cupid back there seemed pretty shocked to see me alive.”

“Oh, _G-d.”_ Jon slumps against the couch, wedging his fingers underneath his glasses to rub at his eyes. “How bad was it?”

“Think I recall something about a bet? Right, yeah, he said he bet that I _wasn’t_ dead, but he didn’t believe it. Not the worst thing someone’s said to me.” Gerry shifts where he sits, but nudges his leg back against Jon’s once he settles. “Who did he bet against, though? Not you.”

Jon recovers from dropping his jaw. “Lord, no, not me. I can’t believe they’d…” Ugh. Tim is going to hear about this later. “I… suppose it would have to be Sasha?”

“She a pessimist?” Gerry asks. Jon wrinkles his nose.

“Pragmatic,” he nods. “She’s actually the one who found the record of your name change, some time back. That’s about as far as we got before you seemed to just… fall right off the map. I suppose that… could have been it for her on believing you could be found.”

Gerry hums, considering. “That’s probably because I never actually put my name on the lease in Pittsburgh. Paid rent out of pocket.”

Jon balks. “How did you afford that?”

“My dad had _really_ great life insurance.”

A snort catches indecorously in Jon’s mouth, his hand raised to seal it away. Gerry grins.

“You’re allowed to laugh,” he says. “It was a joke. Basil actually covered most of it.”

One more name to catalogue, and remember to ask about later. How many were there, overall? How much love has he amassed over time, finally?

“Yes, I know it was,” Jon agrees. “I just— you’re funny, is all.”

“Weren’t expecting my sense of humour survive the war?”

Jon lets his shoulders drop. “It’s just good to hear you laugh.”

“Yeah, well.” Gerry shrugs. “If I don’t, there’s no telling what would come out instead. Life’s not so bad, anyway, some of the time.”

For a moment, Jon doesn’t know what to say to that. He tries to consider a time when he might have responded to it with an easy agreement over dismissal. It blurs and distorts, but it may not have been so long ago. Sometime before the Archives, when researching cases had almost been fun. When days ended in a big booth at the back of Ernie’s, and waking up alone in the morning meant that someone had helped him get home safe.

“I was also just waiting ‘til my hair grew back,” Gerry says suddenly. “Stupid as anything, but I remember waking up from surgery more pissed that they shaved a giant patch out of the back than about the fact that it was so they could get into my skull. Tell me that isn’t petty.”

Jon tries not to cringe. “I don’t know. I might have done the same thing.”

“The _asymmetry,”_ they say together, and then laugh.

“Right,” Gerry nods. “I lost more of it during the second try at radiation, since the surgery didn’t get it all, which didn’t make hiding it much easier. When the shaved bit got long enough, I just lopped it all off to match. Start over, all that. Didn’t realize how heavy it was weighing on me ‘til I had Kira come at me with the scissors.”

“It’s hard to imagine you with short hair,” Jon muses.

Gerry points a finger up by his ear. “I had it shorter than this when we were kids.”

“It was also brown when we were kids,” Jon counters. “And that wasn’t quite you, either.”

At that, Gerry barely stifles a snort. It didn’t strike Jon as particularly funny, but then again, Gerry had just been laughing about his cancer, too.

“Could say the same.” Gerry tilts his head. “Longer suits you. You look good.”

It should be more jarring, Jon thinks, that Gerry can manage to sound so shameless when he says things like that. It should be, maybe, but Jon can’t summon the will to feel anything but the birds in his stomach as they stretch their wings, settling. Smaller now than the albatross, and so many of them.

He lets out a long breath. “I’ve gone on something of a journey, with mine. I had it long all through uni, up until I took my first position at the Institute. Thought it would look sharper.”

Gerry wrinkles his nose. “Your friend’s looked longer than I’ve ever had mine, he looked sharp enough.”

“I know,” Jon sighs. “He’s largely to blame for me growing it out again.”

“Encouraging guy?”

Jon pauses. “Yes. Yes, very much so.” 

He clears his throat, swiping at his upper lip. Gerry lets him falter, allows a silence. Jon considers his conversational options, and chooses to dial back.

“Do you plan on letting yours grown more?” he asks. “Past where you have it now?”

“Probably,” Gerry says, twisting the end of a strand behind his ear. “Been comfortable like this, though, so no rush on it. I drop a lot less money on dye.”

“I can imagine.” Jon itches to shift how he’s sitting, hip aching with stagnation, but he doesn’t want to remove his legs from the gentle tangle they’re still in with Gerry’s. “You look good, too, by the way. It— you look nice.”

Gerry plucks at his shirt now, shaking his head at the little stegosaurus stitched into the breast pocket. “I don’t usually look like this.”

“What, no mesh?” Jon teases, leaning his chin into his hand. Gerry smiles back at him, brow quirked.

“Actually, that’s the only part of this I _do_ usually wear. Just not in pink.”

“I like it.” Jon sits up a bit, stretching his shoulders back. “I have a saree in that colour, actually. The— the long drape, you know.”

Something lights up in Gerry’s eyes, silvergrey and alert. He watches as Jon relaxes forward, experimental in his response. “Sounds pretty.”

“I haven’t worn it in a long time.” Jon smiles. He knows how sad it must look. “I have one of my mother’s, too. Blue, with— with bronze embellishments in the pallu. Beads, embroidery.”

“Like your bedroom back in Bournemouth?”

Jon falters. “…Yes, just like that. I’m— surprised you remember.”

Gerry breathes a laugh through his nose. “Just hit me right when you said that. It makes sense, if it goes back to something comforting.”

“Right,” Jon says. “Right… yes, comforting.”

It’s rotting in his closet. Jon’s eyes fall to the dinosaurs on Gerry’s shirt again, something sore blooming in his chest. The birds in his stomach peck at it like a fruit, bruising it with blunted beaks.

“Dinosaurs?” he finally asks. “Really?”

Gerry’s nose scrunches. “Heavy-handed?”

“I just—” No, enough. Jon can’t stand it anymore. He draws his legs up further onto the couch, repositioning his bad leg by hand. Gerry scoots back to make room for him to take up more space on the center cushion, accommodating and patient until he leans back against the arm behind him. “Sorry. It’s not that it’s too much, I just… I’m just trying to wrap my head around how much thought you put into this.”

“Well, I’ll come clean about the outfit and tell you this is more Joy’s fault. She heard I’d have a month to kill and insisted on a _shopping spree._ Every other night for the past two weeks, I’ve had to sit through a different kind of face mask.” Gerry snorts, affectionate for the memory, and displays one of his hands over his knee. “Abby did my nails.”

Jon cranes his neck to see, adjusting his glasses and squinting across the distance. Most of Gerry’s nails are painted in a neat, matte black, save for the ring fingers done in white, some of them accented with paper-thin lines of the opposite colour.

“By hand?” Jon asks. “The precision is excellent.”

“I should bloody well hope so,” Gerry laughs. “She tattoos people for a living.”

“Ah, so _Abby’s_ your boss, who is also your flatmate, who is also exceedingly invested in your wardrobe?”

“She really thought I should put my best foot forward for you.”

The roll of Gerry’s eyes doesn’t soften the blow of the implications. Jon crosses his arms, a nervous sound nudging itself out of his mouth.

It’s not a secret, of course. As hard as he tried to clinicalize his approach to his task here, it was always called _Operation Dawson._ It still came down to the trinket he carried with him, to dadima placing it in his hands like a compass. She had no way of knowing where his heart would end up, but Tim never let him forget it. Some part of him still wants to fight it, to feign ignorant, but Gerry is clear enough for him to understand without asking.

“Tim stole my hair elastic,” Jon says, before he realizes it makes no sense out of context. “Before I left to meet you, I mean, he wouldn’t let me out of the room until I looked presentable. Feels like he spent ten minutes rearranging my buttons.”

Gerry grins, eyes flickering down as if to check. Jon reaches up to clutch at the dragon claw, instinctive in his defensive reluctance to let other people see it until he remembers that he had left it on display for a reason. 

“He’d get on with Joy,” Gerry observes. “She thinks of this as ‘a Hallmark movie, but actually good.’”

Jon gives a sage nod. “Tim thinks it’s an action-romance thriller-mystery.”

“They’d both agree on the _Titanic_ bit, then. That movie is a trainwreck.”

“Shipwreck,” Jon mumbles mildly. Gerry dissolves into snickers again. When Ophelia wanders back into the room, he seems to remember something.

With another quick command and a pointed finger, the dog jumps excitedly towards the task of retrieving a black rucksack from where it sits on a nearby armchair, toting it over to the couch before she departs to the plush dog bed in the corner of the room. Gerry takes the opportunity to rearrange how he’s sitting, scooting to move closer to Jon and settle the rucksack on his lap in display.

“Don’t be too embarrassed about keeping that for so long,” he says, nodding to the necklace. “I’ve got a pretty strong crow instinct. Some of these, I’ve had for over half my life.”

The entire front of the rucksack is cluttered with paraphernalia. There is a circular patch sewn onto the top that reads _FREEDOM, EQUALITY, ANARCHO-COMMUNISM,_ and a stretch of rainbow and a series of band logos sewn underneath it. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the pins and buttons, all mismatched and some too brightly coloured to clearly strike as Gerry’s style. Many of them look homemade, affixed by stubborn will alone.

“Which ones?” Jon asks. Gerry lifts up a resin sphere on a short chain affixed to the zipper of the bag, preserving the tiny petals of a yellow dill flower. At first glance, it looks entirely pristine, but Jon can see the bumps and nicks as Gerry rolls it between his fingertips.

“I had this friend growing up,” he explains. “Tazia. My mum did ‘business’ with her parents, and we ended up sort of connecting about being trapped in the same sinister gondola. She gave me this the last time I was over, I think we were… eighteen? I never told her I was Italy the last time I was there, period.”

“Why not?” Why wouldn’t he want to see his friend?

Gerry watches the petal sphere turn in his grasp. “Her estate was never safe for someone like me. I’d just gotten acquitted. She wasn’t interested in leaving her own prison. We wouldn’t have seen eye to eye anymore.”

Jon reaches out to touch the bracelet pinned across the front, neon green pony beads hanging loosely on a snapped elastic held together with a desperate knot and a bubble of hot glue. Gerry explains that it’s a Kandi bracelet, given by a girl who was more than happy to teach him the handshake ritual for exchanging them with Peace, Love, Unity, and Respect, and who hugged him tightly when it moved him to tears. It devastated him to have broken it, but losing a few beads wouldn’t lose him the memory.

“Why were you at a rave in Norway?”

“What the fuck else is there to do in Norway?”

“Yes, but a _rave?”_

“It was an accident.”

Most of the stories are simple, and quiet. There is a small, lightweight rock with a smiley face painted onto it that Ophelia apparently picked up out of an old man’s garden, and when Gerry tried to return it, he was told he needed it more than the flowers did. It’s wrapped in and secured to the bag with the same wire that he wove through an origami ninja star that he’d gotten from a young boy on a long bus ride, where they spent three hours flicking it at each other across the aisle in silence. There’s no touching story behind the strawberry keychain he’d gotten out of a Gashapon capsule in Japan; he just liked it.

Soreness wells in Jon’s throat as he traces his fingers along the keepsakes. Gerry’s hand is resting idle on the top of the bag, fiddling with a zebra-print awareness ribbon from the owner of a bed and breakfast who had a daughter with Ehlers-Danlos, too.

“What’s up?” he asks, careful. Jon shakes his head, cursing the burn behind his eyes.

“I just… I was just thinking— why me? Why seek _me_ out so fiercely, out of all these other people you had longer with, o-or had more reason to wonder after. We knew each other for three days, and most of it was _miserable_ for us both. Why am I the one you got sober for?”

Gerry blows air between his lips and lets it make a sound. “It’s not as much to do with what happened when we were kids. Honestly, back then, it was Miriam who stuck out most to me. I got my reconnection with her.”

“Then why didn’t you stop there?” Damn. Jon swipes at his eyes, determined to keep them dry. “You still haven’t explained it, quite, I-I just— there’s a lot of information all at once, but it still feels like I don’t understand enough about _why.”_

“Do you want to slow down?” Gerry asks. “Backtrack some more?”

“No, that— that could take ages, I just…” He twists to let his legs down off the couch and set his feet on the floor again, turning away from Gerry. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to get like this all of a sudden, I’m just—”

“Overwhelmed?”

Jon pulls his glasses from his face, grinding the heels of his palms into his eyes as he rocks forward. “I’m trying not to be.”

“It’s okay if you are,” Gerry says. “It’d be sort of weird if you weren’t.”

“I almost hate that you’re not,” Jon laughs, and it’s regrettably damp.

Gerry leans forward over the rucksack, cheek in hand to peer at him. “It takes a lot for me to get there.”

“No kidding.” With a sniff and a sigh, Jon sits up and back again. “It just feels like I’m a part of something that I’m not seeing the whole of. I don’t really know how I could have left a mark like that without realizing.”

Gerry sits up. His hand moves to tap at a button with his fingernail without looking away from Jon’s face to find it, its placement on the front pocket memorized.

“You should ask about this one.”

It’s a plastic bottle cap, filled up with hot glue and cemented to the back of a safety pin. There’s a sloppy carving of a bird on it — Jon can hardly tell. The surface is too small to allow for much detail, but it looks vaguely like a duck. Jon sulks at it, trying to parse its evident importance before Gerry tells the story.

“So, I was on the tube this one time. Don’t even remember where I was going, but I stood up to make room for someone who came in on crutches. Not the best at standing upright for a long time, of course. But he didn’t shrug me off when I needed to lean on him.”

Something heavy slots into place. Jon barely masks a sharp breath, his eyes wide with renewed burning. His hands fly up to cover his mouth, head shaking in mortified refusal. _“No.”_

Gerry winces in sympathy. “You wanted to know.”

“You have _got_ to be _kidding me.”_ Jon ducks his face into his hands, bowing forward to hide. The birds in his stomach remember themselves and take up every centimeter of free space in a swarm of frantic wingbeat. “There’s no way, that’s— oh, _G-d…”_

Gerry doesn’t give him long to process it. “I wish I’d tried harder to talk to him. Wish I’d tried harder the _first_ time, but I was too screwed up then to even look at his face.”

_“What?”_ The question is dizzy, blood rushing wrongly through his head. The first time? What else is there? Gerry had already told him about the courtyard, the courtyard had been bad _enough,_ but now there’s something else? Something before the tube, _before_ everything had started really falling apart?

“I’d met him before, is the thing,” Gerry continues, much to the discontent of the birds. “In a convenience store once, when I was in a bad way. I wanted to lean on him then, too, even though I didn’t know him. Just thought he looked nice.”

Gerry plucks at the knee of his trousers as if expecting to find a hole there, a thread to pull. Jon stares without blinking, his hands slipping now to cover only his mouth. The febrile birds are growing weary, one by one falling away from flight.

“It was three days ‘til Christmas,” Gerry says. “Which I honestly might’ve forgotten were it not for the—”

“The woman with the jingle bells,” Jon breathes. Panic is waning, slipping away. “Yes, I… I remember now.”

He remembers that much. He can picture it now, can think back and place Gerry into the memory like pulling the photo from a locket and placing it back into the whole it was cut from. The ability to do even just that is almost enough to grant instant relief, too powerful to threaten with doubt. He can see it now.

Gerry looks almost nervous again, almost worried. It’s hard to tell with the faint smile still there, the one that sings of self-reproach and apology. The warning prelude to confession of a personal crime, the permission to deliver punishment. It’s brave and it’s terrible and it _aches_ and Jon wishes more than anything that he had never learned to smile that way. 

“I thought about stopping you outside. But I wasn’t sure you’d be interested.”

Jon looks to his cane for a glimpse of the sticker wrapped around the top. Tim’s doing, yet again, but Jon had challenged himself to leave it there. To take a bi flag off of his person would be a declaration of shame, wouldn’t it? It’s quiet enough. The only people who might look so hard at his cane are the sort that want to understand him in some way, and it already says so much about him that he can’t cut out of himself. What better place to affix attempts at pride?

He doesn’t know if he felt anything like that towards the quiet person in the convenience store that night, but he knows he’d felt something. Intrigue. Concern, mostly. He might have been worrying about his blood sugar or something. He might have just been looking for an excuse to see if looking at him would answer any of the questions that built up in his head about nothing, nothing at all. Nothing he can remember now, even if he can recall the silhouette of a troubled someone. It just felt like he was the right person to give the peppermint stick to. 

But now Jon can’t help the part of him that wonders where he could have safely worn his identity before he couldn’t walk without setting off signal flares. Would Gerry have stopped him outside if he’d had a patch on his jacket, a rucksack glittering with signifiers? Would they have turned out alright if the first thing they had done was kiss in the snow before the rest caught up with them?

Jon shakes himself from the thought. He reaches for his cane to draw it across his lap, rolling it in his hands until he can press at the corner of the flag sticker with his thumb.

“I would say you’d have had… at least somewhat of a chance.”

The calm in Gerry’s response only barely masks its joy. “Good to know.”

After a moment, Jon nudges him with the handle of his cane. “That was very dramatic. Bravo.”

“Sorry,” he smiles. “I might’ve rehearsed that part.”

“I can tell.” Jon lets himself laugh once, and the following silence is broken by the sound of buzzing from inside his bag. He thought he’d heard his phone going off before, but a new vibration cuts more clearly through the silence now that they’ve paused to laugh.

With an apology, he bends to fish it out of his bag with the intent to clear away the notifications and turn it from vibrate to silent, but there is no ignoring the onslaught once he squints to see who it’s from.

**Tim Stoker**  
  
**Today** 10:45 AM  
**Tim:** Hey so I didn't get brutally murdered that’s a start  
**Tim:** He just got on my case about cronuts? Which I guess is a win  
**Tim:** So I can’t haunt you if you haven’t kissed Gerry yet but I WILL be pissed about it   
  
**Today** 11:28 AM  
**Tim:** Are you busy or are you ignoring me  
  
**Today** 11:52 AM  
**Tim:** Seriously how’s it going  
**Tim:** Are you okay?  
**Tim:** Hey Jon  
**Tim:** You legally can't get upset with me for spamming you I nearly DIED today  
**Tim:** Spamming rights for a week at least  
**Tim:** Helloooo  
  
**Today** 12:13 PM  
**Tim:** Btw can you get Gerry to sign something for Martin  
**Tim:** He said “why would I want that” but he did that pouting face like when he actually DOES want something and just doesn't want to SAY it  
**Tim:** But We Know  
**Tim:** I think he’s sad he didn’t get to be a part of the escapade :-(  
**Tim:** So I think we owe him at least an autograph  
  
**Today** 12:36 PM  
**Tim:** Ok I’m seriously worried  
**Tim:** Send a 7 if you need help  
**Tim:** DAMMIT we forgot CHAPSTICK  


"Oh, my G-d. H-Hang on, I need to just—"

**Jon:** Not dead. NOT kissed.  
**Tim:** Then what the FUCK is the point  


Jon flinches when Gerry chuckles from over his shoulder. He’s moved the rucksack onto the floor and slid closer to read the phone, no doubt intrigued by the massive string of text messages and apparently nowhere near as embarrassed as Jon is by what they say.

“I really like this guy.”

Without thinking, Jon swats a hand out to catch his shoulder in flustered reprimand. He closes his messaging app and drops his phone to pinch at the bridge of his nose.

“I’m so sorry,” he groans. “He doesn’t usually do that unless he’s anxious.”

Gerry nods. “Near death will do that.”

“I just don’t understand why he’s so hung up on—? I’ve _told_ him it’s ridiculous, and that it’s none of his business. Please don’t take him too seriously, I wasn’t going to try and— Not _now,_ i-it would be— Of course you wouldn’t want to— Christ, I’m a mess.” 

Jon hadn’t realized how embarrassing the words are until they were tumbling out of his mouth, and by then all he can do to stop rambling is drop his face into his hands in dismay. A hand settles between his shoulder blades, careful and almost too warm through his shirt. It lifts away in an instant when Jon flinches forward. Jon doesn’t have the time to tell him that he’s been hurt there before Gerry finds a clearer spot on his own, tracing a gentle shape into the small of his back.

“I’d say you have at least somewhat of a chance.”

Jon looks up to see Gerry wincing at himself, still smiling faintly. Somewhere, Tim’s not-ghost is organizing a parade. Jon would be more sympathetic if his heart hadn’t stopped.

“It’s not too… too fast?”

“We’ve been at this for two decades,” Gerry points out. “I think you’re fine.”

Jon rolls his eyes. “Well, this wasn’t exactly on my mind when we were _children.”_

“Fine, right, it’s been almost _one_ decade since… that one winter, the first time I thought about it. And for half that time, you’ve been wearing my necklace.”

“Yes, but— but we’ve technically _just_ met?”

“I’d say this constitutes as a bit of a special situation.” Gerry laughs, and then sobers. “I’m not trying to push. I just want to you to know my stance on it.”

Jon tucks his hair behind his ear so that he can peer sideways at him without turning his head. “Which is… amenable to the idea?”

“To put it lightly.”

Gerry’s confessions hang on the coattails of cautious humour. His mouth is still curved into that soft, fugitive’s smile, and Jon aches. Gerry reclaims his hand to prop his elbow on the back cushion of the couch, temples rested against his curled fingers.

“I’ve done a lot worse with total strangers.” The short laugh he gives puts a pit in Jon’s stomach. Gerry looks back at his face once it stops. “But I did that to hurt myself as much as I wanted it to help. That’s not how I see you.”

“How do you see me?”

Perhaps not everyone might need it spelled out for them, but that has never been who Jon is. Gerry has known that from the beginning. He pauses to consider.

“That’s changed some over time,” he decides, dropping his arm. “Not all of it is great. Bit parasocial, Abby said, and she’s right. But I suppose you started off as a question that needed answering. Then I got more and more scared of what the answer would be, because actually, the question was whether I was even good enough to ask.

“I was going to wait until I was sober, but then it was the cancer. Then I was going to wait until I was cancer free, but I don’t know if I ever will be. I was going to wait until I was back from America, but then Gertrude just left me there.” Gerry shakes his head. He doesn’t look particularly sad. “That might actually be the other useful thing she gave me. I think I needed those six months with Basil and Kira to really see.”

“See what?” Jon is not willing to cut through Gerry’s explanation with more than a prompt here or there.

Gerry shrugs. “That I don’t think anybody is ever just _done_ getting better.”

A blue swallow flitters across Jon’s memory, newly inked into his dadima’s old skin. The tentative completion of a journey that she hadn’t felt might be over until they said they loved each other at the kitchen table at four in the morning during his third visit home as summer began. She wasn’t done getting better, either, and neither was he. But she had chosen to spend the end of everything in contentment, the way a bird settles on the ocean to rest its wings.

“This is where the parasocial bit comes in,” Gerry warns him, “but it feels kind of like I _do_ know you, a little. I know it’s just through stories from dadi and stupid shit I made up in my head after seeing you somewhere random, but I mean, it just happened so many times. In my experience, that usually means something. I wanted to believe it could mean something good for once. I don’t want it to just _stop_ there.”

Of all the things Jon expected to feel upon hearing that, the last one was relief. Suddenly, he feels far less guilty for having done the very same thing.

Half the time, Gerry was this unattainable storybook character. Jon felt awful for admiring him so much; it felt superficial and shallow, like falling in love with centuries-old diary entries or a tragic protagonist that you just wish you could take care of. He’d agonized over the morality of it, whether it was fair, whether he was out of his mind, but any time he thought it might be kinder to take the pendant from his neck and stick it in the drawer with that notebook, he couldn’t bear to do it.

“Does that make sense?” Jon blinks himself back into focus to find that Gerry is no better at masking anxiety than he is his overactive heart rate after too long on his feet. “Or have I completely scared you off?”

“Oh! Yes, no, I-I know exactly what you mean, I mean— I feel like… I know you, too? Sort of. N-Not really, but…” Jon turns his head away, rubbing at the edge of a bandage on his neck. “I’ve read statements about you, and—”

“Oh, _G-d,_ I’m in statements…” Gerry groans, like it’s only embarrassing.

“I’m surprised that you’re surprised by that,” Jon laughs, letting his hand fall. “It’s— I know I’d gone to the Institute hoping to find some trace of you, but I never expected it to be through… that.”

“What were you hoping for?”

“I knew you were involved in things, so I assumed that if I was there, maybe I would just— hear something about you, maybe from someone who worked there? Or see something that you had alluded to in the book we made, or just… encountered someone who could tell me your second name so I could do the rest myself.”

Gerry gives him almost a glare. “So, you really did just look at my warning and decide, _nah. I won’t take that seriously.”_

Jon’s forehead dips. “I mean, not in those _terms,_ but—”

Against expectation, Gerry smiles again. “Relax, Jon.” He shifts against the back cushions, folding his arms around his middle. “I should have known better than to think some cryptic note would be enough.”

With a scoff, Jon faces him again to mirror his position. “Come to think of it, actually… probably? I-I mean… what would _you_ have done, if I’d left you something like that?”

“Moot point,” Gerry says. He tilts his head against the couch. “Already did it.”

Jon crosses his arms tighter, pressing down on the cluster of birds. He doesn’t know how many there are now, only that they’re ticklish and insistent.

“Right,” he smiles, ducking his head. He lifts one hand to push his hair back behind his ear again as it falls into his face. “I— I suppose that’s true, yes.”

Ophelia returns to the edge of the couch, then, Tortellini close behind her. She props her paws up on the center cushion until Gerry gestures for her to climb up, spinning herself around until she can tip over onto his lap. Jon might have gotten a little lost in watching the way Gerry cradles her head to his stomach had Tortellini not started clinging onto his trouser leg from the ground, chittering as he bobbed his head to sniff at the air around him.

“You’ll need to pick him up,” Gerry advises. “And he’ll probably just spin around on your legs for a little until he gets tired of it, but he’s fine to hold.”

“Oh, um…” Jon hesitates, peering down at the little soot-coloured thing at his feet. Tortellini stares back, tiny nails pulling at his trouser leg as if preparing to climb him. Jon contemplates how to even reach for him; picking up ferrets is different from picking up cats. They’re so… _floppy,_ it feels almost like they’ll be more easily hurt by being grabbed the wrong way.

Tortellini lifts easily by the underarms, regardless, and does elect to spin around on Jon’s lap for an extended moment. Jon glances up at Gerry with a raised brow only to find him smiling again, and the fondness there is enough to staunch any urge to wince at the feeling of little claws poking into each of his thighs.

Well, almost. It _does_ smart.

“At least he’s nowhere near so heavy as the Lioness,” Gerry muses. He drops his eyes down to Ophelia, stroking a hand over the side of her face. The angle of her head pressed to his stomach leaves her neck in funny little rolls. She looks as peaceful as anything.

Jon glances away. “She was a bit of a trampler, yes.”

Gerry hums. “When did she go?”

“The fall of 2014, funny enough,” Jon tells him. “I… took her in after dadima passed, two years prior.”

Gerry just nods. “What time of year?”

“Hm?”

“Your dadima,” Gerry repeats. “What time of year did she die? The season.”

The ferret shifts, finally lowering himself down to sprawl across Jon’s legs. Jon sets a tentative hand at the back of his neck, scratching one finger gently between his ears. “Just before spring.”

Now Gerry’s eyes pinch at the corners. “Right.”

“I’m sorry,” Jon says. “I might have been able to tell you if I knew how to reach you, but she really _never_ gave me your contact. I even looked for where it might be written down in her study, and it was just… nowhere.”

“Really?” Gerry asks, even knowing that it must be true. “Even right at the end?”

“It drove me _mad,”_ Jon admits, but with none of the heat he used to feel about it. “But she refused to betray your trust. Even to me.”

The piercing under Gerry’s lip is the only thing about him that moves for a moment, even his eyes unblinking as he stares ahead. Jon bites the inside of his cheek.

“That makes the last time I spoke to her sort of miserable,” Gerry admits. “I called her in February, to apologize for ruining everything she’d done for me. I could hear she was sick, but I was too…” He winces, more critical than pained. “That entire winter was bad.”

Jon does the math in his head. February of 2012, and so the winter of—

“Oh.” His eyes fall to Gerry’s arms, smeared in patches of faint, dry watercolour that don’t belong there. “I— I think I read that one.”

Gerry’s eyes go big, before he just closes them. “Of course _that_ made it to the Archives.”

“I-I’ve read at least four, but that one was… That one was different.”

Jon remembers it viscerally. Unexpectedly, sometimes, his hand will pass over a cooling burner on his stovetop and he’ll think of what it must be like to burn alive, and to fight serenely through the pain of it. He’ll remember reading about a man with a pain tolerance that could make a witness weep, and wonder how Lesere Saraki had managed not to. He nearly had while recording it, but maybe that much was just his own fear.

Gerry rubs his forehead, sighing. “Yikes. Kind of an unfortunate second first impression. I must have really scared you.”

“That wasn’t the one I read first, but— I mean… yes? Though I was more afraid _for_ you. It— reading statements, is. I… don’t know how to explain it, I just. I feel… almost like I’m there. And it’s disorientating, it’s confusing, it… Sometimes it hurts. And reading that one was…” Jon trails off, fighting a shudder. “It was horrible, Gerry, I just— I hated knowing you went through that kind of pain, that… _that_ was the sort of thing that may have always been happening to you, and I couldn’t go back in time to stop any of it.”

Gerry looks at him for a long moment. “I’m sorry you had to read that.”

Jon nearly recoils. “Gerry, you’re the one who—”

“I’ve gotten past it,” he shrugs. “It’s possible to heal from these things, a little bit. Takes time, hard work. But it’s possible.”

Gerry’s eyes skip over the divots scattered across the flesh of Jon’s left cheek, almost in indication. Jon withdraws, curls inward. He wills himself not to remember the way his head hit the ground before Tim caged his arm around it, all the nerve damage he took in recompense. A few worms had come down and fallen in the spaces between as their defensive interlock fell slack, the burrow mark at Jon’s right temple still half-open enough to bandage. Still on display when he turns his head to hide the others.

How does anyone heal from something like that? Jon has known chronic pain all his life. He’d taught himself how to understand it before any trained professional affirmed him. He set his own wrists. He learned to live with the cane; had even come to love it.

This is different. This is honeycomb skin, the knowledge that something is missing now, eaten away, hollowed with the intention of being filled by uninvited guests. Waking up in the morning and wondering where half of his face has gone, how does it hurt so badly when he can’t feel it? Why did the leg that has already suffered need to make nice with a corkscrew, why did he have to lose the few routine sleeping positions that he’d engineered to keep him from tossing and turning? He can’t wedge the same three pillows under his back anymore, has no choice but to sleep on his stomach on the nights he can stand to get in bed. No choice but to face the window and watch for the windless shift of closed curtains.

The bathroom mirror calls out for him to judge himself, to practice smiling and fail. He feels like Melpomene and Thalia if they were conjoined twins, Comedy and Tragedy as a single mask. Of all the petty losses to mourn, the worst had been the notion that he could ever kiss anyone again. What if his mouth didn’t move the same way anymore? Who but Tim would understand now? Who but him might be just as afraid?

Gerry is still looking at him by the time Jon looks back.

There is scarcely an inch of him that isn’t marked by an unforgiving world; his bare arms are sleeved in faded firestrokes, and they’re still circled serenely around the dog snoozing in his lap. He limps like that handprint around his ankle has finally caught up to him, but he’s sought out something to lean on. The bruised shadows above his cheekbones are so deep that the makeup can’t hope to hide them, but there is no exhaustion in the adoration in his eyes.

That’s what it is, Jon realizes. Somehow, Gerry had kept that. Somehow, he learned it.

Somehow, Jon has earned it. He wants to believe he can understand how, but it’s hard to when he can’t feel half his face.

“What are you thinking?”

Now that Jon has seen it, he can hear it in Gerry’s voice, too. Jon sniffs before he manages a laugh, dropping his focus to the ferret fully stretched out on his own lap.

“How did you do it?” he asks, no preamble. “You— I don’t mean to be insensitive, but you’re—”

“Covered in evil graffiti tags?” Gerry completes, mouth lilting. “It’s fine to ask. Like I said, I’ve made my peace.”

“Exactly, and I— I don’t know how to do that, too, I’m—”

“It’s still fresh. Don’t rush yourself.”

“I don’t have _time_ to sit and dwell on it!” The words rush out of him, almost a snap. The ferret on his lap stirs upright and fidgets away from him, flopping onto the cushion until he’s on his feet and can leap back onto the ground with a scrambling _thud._ Ophelia opens her eyes, only watching Jon as he covers his mouth to center himself.

“It’s fresh, yes,” he tries again. “And I don’t have time for it. I don’t have _time_ to feel— to feel _disgusting,_ to feel like I’m— like I can never touch anyone again, i-in case it rubs off on them, this— this _feeling,_ this—” Deep breath. With the pressure gone from his lap, he has no choice but to hug himself tightly to make up for it. “It… _hurts,_ still, and I know they’re only wounds. I know wounds heal, eventually, but—” 

“But they were caused by evil worms trying to eat you.”

“I was _eaten_ by _worms.”_ It sounds just as horrible now as it did the first time he had to think the words straight. “How— H-How, how do you just get past something like that?”

Gerry pats Ophelia’s flank to rouse her from her doze, nudging her until she gets to her feet. She lands on the ground with a softer sound than the ferret despite being so much bigger, a certain grace in her movements that just makes Jon compare them all the more critically. 

Ophelia has been given a purpose. She knows what she’s doing and she’s gentle about it, until she has to snarl at a threat and stand her ground. The ferret is going grey, not silver, and twitches like malfunctioning machinery. He has to be picked up because he’s too small to get up on the couch himself, his name is fucking _Tortellini,_ and alright, Jon is projecting onto a dog. Which is entirely unfair, because the ferret didn’t do anything wrong.

“Why are you in such a hurry?” Gerry asks.

“What?”

“You’re saying you ‘don’t have time.’ What’s your rush?”

“I—” Jon flounders. “There’s so much going on, there’s— Gertrude was _murdered,_ it had to have been someone inside the Institute, and—”

Gerry almost barks a laugh. “Might’ve thought this morning would clear that one up.”

“Well, it certainly heightens my _suspicions,_ but—”

“Uh, yeah, I sure _hope_ it does.”

Jon glares. “Did you just quote a _Vine_ at me? Now?”

“What, you think I’ve been existing in some secret, Tolkienian fantasy world where I don’t have access to the internet? If Eldritch monstrosities can weaponize modern technology, I can watch funny videos online to take my mind off it for an hour.”

“Which is what I don’t _understand,”_ Jon groans. “How can you stand to think of anything else?”

“You have to,” Gerry shrugs, “or it’ll eat you alive. Been there, done that.”

Jon shakes his head. “I’ve only just begun. I-I-I’m not like you, I haven’t— You’re used to it and you’ve had enough and I respect that, I _know_ I should be proud of you, happy for you, because I can’t imagine how you’ve suffered, living like this for so long, like— But I feel stranded, I-I feel… separated from the rest, like, like I don’t belong anywhere. On either side of understanding.”

_“That_ is the Corruption talking.”

“The _what?”_

“The worms,” Gerry says. He gestures to a dull spot on the column of his throat, like the imprint of an ember. “And the bees. And the love gone completely rotten.”

Jon stares at him, dumbfounded. “I don’t follow the last.”

Gerry doesn’t waver. “That’s what it is. You’re bitten or you’re stung or _infected_ and you get this idea that no one will ever love you while you’re like this, so you need to shut yourself up in some… cocoon, push away anyone who might’ve loved you before. Then you forget you did that and just think they never loved you at all, and by then it’s too late to get it back, so you have to find it somewhere else. Somewhere worse, and usually full of bugs.”

Gerry speaks from experience. Jon thinks of Jane Prentiss’ statement, and feels ill.

“You— Are you saying that’s what’s happening to _me?”_

Gerry’s response is to reach out a hand. Jon looks down to see that his right sleeve has ridden up, and that he’s been scratching at the edge of a bandage stuck on his forearm. Gerry closes his fingers around his wrist, fearless and still watching his face.

“I’m saying it doesn’t have to.”

Jon stares into a secondhand memory. What Lesere Saraki saw when she looked down to a bandaged hand grasped tight around her wrist, too strong and too _hot_ to be natural. The fear she felt at that threatening temperature, the ghost of it on Jon’s own arm like rugburn after he’d finally put her statement down. Jon had only left his office to hunch over a bathroom sink, holding his hands under the cold water until they felt like his own again.

Gerry’s hand isn’t so hot, but it’s too warm to be natural. He knows this about himself.

“You held my hand before,” Gerry says. “Did it make you feel like you were going to lose everything? Or like I was about to take it away from you? Be cruel, get mean, try to hurt you?”

“What? _No,_ of course not, that’s— No, not at all.”

“If your theory were sound, that’s what it would have made you feel. That’s what you would be feeling right now.” Gerry turns his hand over to press the back of it against the top of Jon’s wrist. It’s every bit as warm as his palm. “That’s what this is. You read it. You know.”

Second degree burns rarely scar, but what had burned Gerry was no ordinary fire. Jon studies the length of Gerry’s arm, seeking the centimeter-wide rings of unburnt skin around his tattoos. It’s all so faded by now, some places far off from the ink appearing perfectly unharmed even with patches of rough pink scattered beside them like scuff marks. It’s hard to tell. The damage is only there when he’s looking for it.

Jon takes Gerry’s hand before he flips it back over, clasping it securely between both of his. Gerry’s eyes widen a fraction, for just a second, and Jon remembers all at once that for all of his wisdom, Gerry is just a person. He recovers quickly and curls his hand around the one that has met his palm to palm, his fingertips just barely skimming the edges of a circular scar.

“That experience took something from me, yeah. And it could have kept taking. But every day that I refuse to let myself have nothing, I’m taking it back all over again.

“I spent a long time thinking I had to keep a distance to keep other people safe, that it was the right thing to do, but that was just feeding the fucking Forsaken.” Gerry rolls his eyes. “You’re more afraid when you feel alone. The more alone you are, the more you’re giving them. You have to choose to tell them no.”

Dadima told him the story. The antithesis to apathy is passion. Once she remembered that, the ocean let her go. Jon tries to think of what could be antithetical to being hollowed out, like the teeming rafters of a house filled with termites, and the word he comes up with is _support._

Gerry dips his shoulder into the couch again, tips his head. Relaxed, even as he tells of the omnipresence of fear. “And if you want it straight? Neither of us are going to get out of this any time soon. Neither of us are ever going to just be untouched ever again. We haven’t been since we met.”

Jon makes an educated guess. “So, why should that mean we can’t touch each other.”

“Or anyone else?” Gerry adds. He nods over to Ophelia, curled up in her plush bed and watching them with the occasional flick of her tail. “Think that dog could love me half as much if I were just an _evil beacon_ of unknowable terror?”

“N—” Jon squints. “No, I-I suppose that wouldn’t make much sense. She probably likes that you’re so warm.”

_“Oh,_ yeah. She’ll be clingy, come winter.”

Gerry looks at her like she’s a miracle. Jon watches his profile, marvels the way his eyes squint into little half-moons. The back cushion welcomes Jon’s shoulder when he finally sinks against it, too, and Gerry’s eyes return to him.

Jon has heard it before; healing isn’t linear. One incomplete conversation with Gerry won’t deconstruct and rebuild him, but he wants to come out of this believing he can make it. That he’ll be braver if he’s not by himself.

And Gerry has always been _so_ brave, so brave when he shouldn’t have needed to be. The love he’s amassed for himself is so new and it should never have been so hard to find, but now that he’s got it, Jon wants to see it kept. He wants to be a part of it. He wants to be here.

The way Gerry is looking at him says he’s asking as much as he’s offering, even if he won’t voice the question. Even now, Gerry is still willing to put what _he_ wants on the shelf. Is it respect, or habit? He doesn’t need to. It’s not a shallow want.

Gerry lets his hand go loose when Jon starts to extract his from the tangle of their fingers to wipe his palms on his slacks. He takes a visible breath when Jon turns to face him and leans forward, still leaning his shoulder into the couch in a refusal to presume. Only when Jon touches his knee does he shift his legs almost timidly from the cushion between them. His cheek is much cooler to the touch than his hands are. For all of his flirting, he looks too nervous to smile.

Every yielding motion strikes a match over _Gerard Keay_ in all his ash and blood and vanishment. Gerry’s eyes are wet as they flicker over different points of Jon’s face until they land on his mouth in disbelieving anticipation, vulnerable and hopeful and alive. Real.

Jon thinks Gerry has always taken the first step. This time, Jon will be brave for them both. There is no question anymore when the answer has always been _yes._

A thin breath shivers out of Gerry’s mouth before Jon’s is pressed against it. The sound becomes a soft hum, quiet and kept behind closed lips until they open just enough for Jon to mirror him and feel it when they come back together. He can feel this much, even with half of his face mostly phantom. He feels the warmth of Gerry’s fingertips balanced at the center of his chest, just shy of his pendant’s natural home. Such a weighty, weighty thing, swinging gently between them now like a pendulum divining a reason for them to break apart.

Jon draws back when he feels it go still. Gerry’s eyes take a moment to focus when they finally flutter back open, visibly dazed. That observation alone is enough to leave Jon feeling winded, as gentle and calm as the kiss itself had been. Ordinary, simple.

It’s almost surprising that Gerry hasn’t said anything yet. No quick and easy quip, no tender declaration. Not that Jon has much of anything to offer now, either. He feels as wordless as the night they met, if for every other possible reason. They sink into the couch again, Jon’s hand on Gerry’s knee, Gerry’s fingers toying idly with the pendant’s purple stone.

When an abrupt laugh nearly chokes him, Jon can’t help bowing forward to let it out. Gerry drops the pendant in surprise.

“What?” Gerry bends to get into his line of sight. Jon shakes his head, snickering. 

“I’m sorry, I’m s-sorry, I just— I just thought of the stupidest thing, and I-I don’t even know why? It just _popped_ into my head, and I— I can’t stop _laughing,_ oh, my G-d, _help—”_

“What was it?” Gerry’s laugh is cautious. His hand finds the clear side of Jon’s face, coaxing him into looking up. “You sort of _have_ to tell me now.”

Jon covers Gerry’s hand with his own. “Oh, I _can’t,_ it’s too— I-I just remembered… _Grulk?_ Of _all things?”_

Before the word is even fully formed, Gerry draws in a sharp gasp. The cackling exhale it fuels is stupendous, and he doesn’t even try to stifle it by hand. He crumples forward against Jon’s arm and curls into the couch to laugh. His fingers grasp at Jon’s shirt in messy handfuls and Jon feels the intense need to wrap around him completely, lightheaded and smiling into the bend of his neck. Jon only stops himself when he hears an odd breath in his ear, hitching beyond laughter.

“Oh… oh, um.” His arms unwind to place both palms flat on Gerry’s back, worrying at the way it shakes. “Gerry, are you alright?”

Gerry nods, sniffling as he wedges a hand in between Jon’s shoulder and his own face. “I’m fine,” he says, high and reedy. “I’m really good, I’m still laughing.”

Jon pulls back, searching. It shouldn’t be so alarming to see that tears have fallen from Gerry’s eyes, but coupled with such a big smile, Jon isn’t sure what to make of it. Gerry rolls his eyes when he catches the bewilderment on Jon’s face, still caught between crying and laughing until he composes himself with a deep breath.

“Okay, wow, yeah. Sorry.” Gerry shakes his head, swiping at his cheeks with his fingertips. “I didn’t mean to do that, sorry. I’m just, um. I’m really happy.”

A slight pressure builds behind Jon’s eyes at that. He drops his hands to his lap, fingers fidgeting. “Is this what… usually happens when you’re happy?”

“That’s sort of subjective. Two days ago, I started tearing up because Ophelia brought me an acorn.” Gerry sniffs again, dabbing at his lashlines. “I’ve just been weepy in general since I started estradiol. It’s gross, I know.”

Just when Jon was sure the stupid, metaphorical birds had been put to rest. “Oh! No, it’s not gross, I-I— I understand, don’t worry.”

For a moment, he wonders at the shape of Gerry’s jaw, the subtle erosion of angularity since he stood still for those mugshots. He wrings his hands to still their urge to move, to shake the sudden feeling of carbonation in his bloodstream.

“Um… So, you— You’re on hormones?”

Adoration must be clear in his eyes, too, because Gerry smiles like he can see it. “Four months, yeah. Joy helped me find the safest provider to buy from and self-medicate the way she does. Finally putting on some weight for once, too. That’s never been the easiest thing for me.”

Jon gives a humourless laugh. “Yes, it’s— Well, I’d imagine it’s harder with cancer.”

“Just a touch.” One of Gerry’s eyes nearly winks shut in a teasing scrunch of his face before he shrugs. “We’re keeping an eye on things. I just couldn’t go the spiro route because of the POTS. There’s only so much pickle juice I’m willing to drink to survive.”

The sneer is half-numb, but Jon doesn’t bother to fight it. “You _drink_ pickle juice?”

“To survive.”

“And here I was just starting to think you were perfect.”

“That was your first mistake.” 

Gerry flashes him another smile before he readjusts himself on the couch to sit up straighter, twisting to either side to crack his back. It reminds Jon to do the same, hanging his legs off the edge of the couch to stretch them and patting around on the cushions for his glasses. It’s a relief to be less compressed and tangled up, even if he can’t quite lean all the way back against the couch behind him when he settles again. His clearer arm can bear more of his weight, his hand slack on the cushion between them until Gerry nudges his fingers with his.

“I’m happy for you,” Jon says. “That you’re in a place to pursue that sort of thing.”

“Thanks,” Gerry smiles. “It’s a _lot_ easier to justify doing stuff that makes your chest sore on purpose when you’re not in constant danger of getting punched in the tit.”

Jon slaps a hand over his mouth to keep a graceless splutter at bay, wheezing. “Was— Was that the selling point?”

“It was Kira’s idea.” Gerry tilts to the side to get his phone out of his pocket. “I send them a selfie every month to mark progress.”

Something so simple as the idea that Gerry is about to show him these photos shouldn’t make those damn _birds_ take off in fits again, but it does. Photos of who he had been before this precise moment in time, ones he felt comfortable sharing not just with him now but with the friends who had changed him so much. Some proof that he’s been existing somewhere else all this time, just in a very different place.

Gerry shifts to press himself closer, his head tucked against the side of Jon’s neck as he unlocks his phone. Jon might believe that affection had always come this easy to him if he didn’t already know how hard he’s had to fight for it. He lets his arm stay looped around Gerry’s shoulders, his nose pressed to the crown of his head as he peeks down at the screen, a short laugh stifled in his hair at the sight of his phone’s wallpaper.

“Is that _you?”_ he asks. “With a _snake_ on your head?”

“Her name is Absynthe,” Gerry confirms, swiping to the next menu screen with fewer application icons obscuring the snake from view. The lower half of his face is cut off in the photo, his eyes straining upwards as if to look up at her and be sure she’s balanced. “I can show her to you later. She’s in my room.”

It’s a strange detail to remember when so many others have been lost, but Jon knows that dadima’s mentioned snakes before. It was on that list of goals they’d made, one of the only items on it that she’d elected to share. That, and the painting. The knowledge that the flat they’re in is sitting just above a tattoo parlour isn’t lost on him at all. Perhaps it wasn’t exactly what dadima had envisioned for Gerry, but thinking about it now, he doesn’t suppose she would be disappointed in the slightest.

“You really listened to her, didn’t you?”

“Hm?” Gerry hums, opening up his photo album.

“Dadima,” Jon clarifies. “She really changed things for you that much?”

For a moment, Gerry sets the phone down on his lap. Jon fights not to draw in too sharp a breath when he feels his forehead nudge more deliberately against the side of his neck. Gerry sighs, his shoulder shrugging under Jon’s fingers.

“She did,” he says simply. “I don’t know that anybody ever really loved me like that before. Enough to tell me I had a future.”

“Of course you’ve got a future,” Jon blurts out. Gerry huffs.

“A good one,” he corrects, tapping Jon’s leg with a curled knuckle. “One where I got to see you again.”

“That can’t be the only thing that makes it good.”

“‘Course not. But it’s been at the top of my list for a while.”

Jon is suddenly overcome with the fierce desire to tighten his grip, to pull Gerry’s head to his chest and hold him there until he’s completely convinced that this isn’t some cruel dream. The only reason he doesn’t is because now Gerry is showing him a picture of Kira’s corn snake, Sweet Clementine, and telling a story about how he ran into a door the first time they asked if he wanted to hold her. Every time they caught him walking around the apartment with her wrapped around him after sneaking her out of her cage after that, his debt could only be repaid by serenading her with “Sweet Caroline” and swaying in the kitchen when he lacked the balance to slow dance. 

Gerry is humming the song to himself as he searches for a photo of the “Estrogen Danlos Syndrome” t-shirt Kira printed for him when the sound of a door creaking open calls the animals to run to the top of the staircase.

“Is it safe to come up yet?”

Jon jolts at the sound of a voice shouting up from the bottom of the stairwell; friendly enough, with a practiced, high curve to it, but ultimately unexpected. Gerry doesn’t move from where he’s nestled, but he sighs as he drops his phone to his lap again.

“You couldn’t have texted me?”

Footsteps. Tortellini scrambles towards the baby gate and overshoots, sliding on his stomach a small ways down the hall before he makes it back. The gate is unlatched and opened a fraction, sunny yellow nails tapping on the floor to tease him before he’s scooped up and gently flipped over in a mock-wrestling move.

“Would you have answered?”

“Point,” Gerry scoffs. “What do you need, Joy?”

“Food! It’s been in the slow cooker since morning. And if you haven’t offered any to your _guest,_ you better have been damn busy.” Silky cherry blossom hair falls forward as Joy pokes her head around the wall, resting her chin in the net of laced fingers. “It’s nearly one, sailor.”

Jon does his best not to stiffen away when Joy glances up at him. He manages to wave, but it’s hard not to turn sheepish under the way she grins at him. Gerry tips his head back as if to look up at him, still unaffected by her presence. Unashamed, perhaps.

“Do you want food?” he asks, and in humiliating, Pavlovian happenstance, a rumble answers before Jon can. He clutches at his stomach to press the sound back in, but the truth has been told.

“...Yes, please,” he admits. “I, um. I skipped breakfast.”

And also, he doesn’t want to go just yet.

Not ever, ideally, but that’s unrealistic. Eventually he’ll have to go back to work. The chances of him being able to smartly navigate the new minefield that has rooted itself into the tile there on an empty stomach are slim.

Lunch is spent exchanging simple facts. Abby calls Gerry ‘sailor,’ too, and Jon earns an excitable ramble about traditional Sailor Jerry tattoos when he asks why. Gerry complains about the first letter being wrong, and Abby shushes him by dropping another spoonful of mixed vegetables onto his plate. He sullenly accepts his fate until Joy says something about replacing him with Jon so they don’t have to hear terrible death music in the middle of the night, at which point he flings a carrot at her with his fork.

Gerry had apparently trained himself to be ambidextrous at some point and was determined to translate that skill into his tattooing. His first real tattoo had been a little punk duckling (a “punkling”) on Abby’s own calf, and she has no problem throwing him under the bus about why he was doodling ducks on his flash exercise sheets. Still, she says it’s better than the very first stick-and-poke she let a friend give her; a mushy-faced little cat on the inside of her bicep. She and Danny were only sixteen and he was never the best artist despite his brief ‘passion’ for it. The sudden sad look in her eyes is almost enough to make Jon ask if she’s alright, but Joy is quick to turn the focus to him and ask if he wants to play twenty questions so they can get to know him. 

Or grill him mercilessly, apparently, because of course. Gerry sips placidly at his water while Jon flounders, but he also tips a knee against his leg under the table to ground him, so Jon supposes he can give them something.

He’s never seen _Donnie Darko_ and he’s only committed _some_ crimes, most of which in the name of academia — just some trespassing, _not_ breaking and entering, and only _mild_ fraud. He doesn’t know what his favourite colour is, because if he says ‘pink’ out loud, he’ll never hear the end of it. He does have a tattoo of his own, yes, and he will not tell them what or where it is. Gerry grouses that he’s just like his grandmother, and Jon tells him that university was a complicated time. He’ll be turning twenty-nine on December 31st, a rather unfortunate birthday so often overshadowed by New Year’s Eve celebrations. Gerry’s is October 5th, and he doesn’t understand what’s so funny until Jon tells him that Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish New Year, and this year, it ends on the 4th. Abby makes a joke about bookends while Joy feeds Tortellini a piece of corned beef under the table and Jon can’t remember the last time he’s smiled so much, even out of nerves.

By the time Gerry warns him of their proximity to the barrier outside, Jon isn’t smiling anymore. The nerves have taken over and are scraping up against the underside of his skin, warning him of what’s to come when he leaves here.

What _is_ to come? What’s waiting for him back at the Institute?

He’s texted Tim since giving him that scanty update — now at least fifty percent unsustainable — and apparently, there’s nothing out of the ordinary going on in the Archives. No one has questioned where he’d gone or why he wasn’t there, and Rosie was unlikely to make a fuss about it when he came back in.

What scares Jon is Elias. Of being cornered in the lobby before he even makes it downstairs, too, or being sent up to his office. Surely, the lecture he received would not be about cronuts.

“I feel like we haven’t talked enough,” Jon says. “A-About— About anything, really, but especially about what I’m walking back into once I cross that threshold.”

“This isn’t the last time we’re going to talk.” Gerry squeezes his hand. “Remember what we agreed on. Go back, act natural, finish out the day, don’t leave alone, go straight to Ernie’s. I don’t think Elias would stop you for a chat, given what happened with Tim this morning. He’s not about to make it any more obvious than he already has. He needs to do damage control.”

Jon fights a grimace. “To what end?”

“I’m not a hundred percent on it yet, but it’s _got_ to be connected to Gertrude. It’s the only reason I can think of as to why he’d come right out into the open to get rid of me. He probably didn’t think Tim would be right there listening. You miss things if you’re focused too hard on something else.”

“But he’ll know that I know something.”

Gerry nods. “That’s the scary part. But we’re going to figure it out.”

“But he’ll _know_ that _I know,”_ Jon repeats.

“He won’t hurt you,” Gerry insists. “He wouldn’t risk it. I don’t think he’ll bring it up at all, at least not for a while yet.”

“How do you know that?”

Gerry lets out an audible breath to the sky. “Gertrude always said he was ‘a very patient man.’ She always laughed a little when she said it, so I’m guessing there’s something to it.”

“Wonderful,” Jon grumbles. He sulks at his cane, wobbling it by the handle.

Gerry ducks his head to kiss him, firm with promise. Jon sways forward to chase it when it’s over, shakes his head pleadingly when Gerry thumbs his unscarred cheek.

“I’ll see you tonight,” Gerry assures him. “I’m gonna get there first and secure the place just like here. You should be fine finding it, if you’re with your friends. Even if they’re bound to the Institute, the tie probably isn’t strong enough for it to apply to them.”

“Like it does to me,” Jon insists. “Because I’m— Because I’m something, and it’s only going to get worse.”

Another kiss, this time to the center of his forehead. “Not on my watch.”

Jon would really like to believe that. Somehow, hearing it from Gerry makes it that much easier to consider, but it doesn’t stick in his head as fact yet. 

“…You’re _positive_ that Elias has something to do with Gertrude? That it couldn’t be _anyone_ else?”

Gerry stares at him. “Jon. I walked into the Institute today and talked to three people. One of them threatened my life, one of them risked his to deliver a note to you, and the other was Rosie. What do you think is the answer to that question?”

“…Well, I don’t actually know much about Rosie, come to think of it—”

_“Jon.”_ Gerry’s face goes flat with severity, even still holding his hand. “That’s exactly what he wants from you. Don’t give it right to him, and don’t start suspecting your friends. You don’t stand a chance if your team falls apart. The closer you keep each other, the safer you’ll be. If you take _anything_ out of talking to me today, I really hope it’s that.”

Jon hangs his head, twisting his pendant between his fingers. It isn’t sticking. He _wants_ it to stick. _Why_ isn’t it sticking?

“I’ll… I’ll try,” Jon manages. “I’ll— I’m sure that you’ll be better at explaining this to them than I will. I just… are you sure it’s a good idea to meet somewhere that we frequent? Wouldn’t he… if he can _see_ things, wouldn’t he know if we were to suddenly disappear from view?”

The idea of Elias knowing which booth they all sit in at Ernie’s makes Jon’s stomach turn. Had he known about _Operation Dawson_ from the beginning? Put it together before Jon had? Could he see the press of ankles under the table, deep pressure on the breakroom couch, a long hug in his office when nothing makes sense? How often was he watching?

Gerry sighs. “Like I said, Elias already knows we met. The damage is done. What we do now doesn’t matter so much, I don’t think, as long as I don’t show my face at the Institute and you don’t talk about me there anymore.”

Jon frowns. “Will that really be enough?”

“No.” Plain and simple. “Which is why I’m not going to let you go through this alone. I’ll do what I can from out here, and you guys can work together inside.”

Something sits wrong about that. Jon keeps his head down, reaching out for Gerry’s hand. Gerry lets him take it, lets him run his thumb along the ridge of his knuckles. Scars, ink. All the same.

“You got out, though. I can’t just… drag you back in. Haven’t you had enough of all this?”

“I was never gonna get all the way out.” Gerry gestures to the street with their joined hands. “There’s not really some huge line between worlds. Fact is, they’re the same one. You and me can just read the fine print.”

“You know that’s not what I mean.”

Gerry tilts his head and smiles. “I know. But even if I don’t operate under the same conditions, I still use the same resources. You’re going to have a harder time getting rid of me than you will just letting me drive the Mystery Machine.”

“And draw the sigils?”

_“Carve_ the sigils,” Gerry corrects. “We don’t half-ass these things.”

Jon manages a thin smile. He turns his head to look out at the road.

It feels wrong to be the one who has to walk away from Gerry now. It’s hazy and grey but Jon remembers being pulled apart the first time, he remembers how it hurt so badly that he’d needed to make himself forget.

That can’t happen again. He won’t let it.

Gerry seems to see it in his hesitation to step backwards. His hand settles on Jon’s shoulder, a thumbstroke over sharp collarbone.

“I’m not going to just disappear.” He dips his head forward to say it, eyes honest and searching. “This place will always be here.”

“Even if I can’t find it on my own?”

“I’ll meet you in the middle.”

Walking out of the barrier isn’t the same as walking in. He steps out of it backwards, stopping short before he has to let go of Gerry’s hand. Gerry’s face draws in concern before Jon pulls himself back by their hands, darting up to drop a last kiss on his cheek. Jon settles flat on his feet again to study his smile long enough to find it unguilty before he steps back again, only dropping his hand from Gerry’s when the reach of their arms runs out. 

There is no wave of shadow to throw him to the ground, or obscure the faint smile on Gerry’s face when he nods at him that it’s safe to turn around and keep walking. Jon can still see him across the gap when he looks back over his shoulder, leaned against a wall to catch his breath and watching him go. With a final, short wave, Jon turns to pull out his phone and dial a taxi company before checking his texts.

There are two more messages from Tim since their last, of course. His anxiety is understandable, given how long Jon’s been gone. For all that Jon still feels he doesn’t understand, Tim has been stewing in the office, alone with his thoughts about the sinister subtext in a lecture on cross-bread pastries.

**Tim Stoker**  
  
**Today** 1:05 PM  
**Jon:** Heading back soon.  
**Tim:** Roger  
  
**Today** 1:47 PM  
**Tim:** “Soon” he says  
**Tim:** I s2g Jon if you eloped  


Jon would love to be understanding about Tim’s anxiety. He really would.

**Jon:** We had LUNCH, Tim. People eat.  
**Tim:** A likely story  
**Tim:** ETA?  
**Jon:** I’m in the car now. Won’t be long.  
**Tim:** The false promise of a vagabond  
**Jon:** Give it a rest. I’ll give you the story in person.  


The taxi pulls up to the pub only minutes after Jon decides to sit down on the front steps. Hardly enough time to stretch his knee before he has to get up again. Maybe that’s just the dread he still feels as he gets closer to the Institute with every passing minute, every mile driven and step taken and secret kept.

Is it really a secret if everyone knows, or is that when it becomes a game?

It doesn’t matter. They’re going to go to Ernie’s tonight, and they’re going to make a plan.

**Jon:** We have a lot to discuss.  
**Tim:** Ominous as hell!  
**Tim:** Can’t wait  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **CW: discussion of cancer; brief reference to animal death**
> 
> maybe grulk can be our always
> 
> and there you have it! 21.3k words of pure love. i can't believe i churned this out in just a week. i hope it was worth the wait!
> 
> PLEASE give credit where credit is due, too! much like gerry, this wouldn't have come out this way were it not for some lovely and supportive friends.  
> \+ the lore i used here for how gerry spent his time in america is attributed to angel @ofdreamsanddoodles' fic [bailey school kids](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24136642/chapters/58115032)! go meet sweet clementine and cry a _lot_ about gerry having friends.  
> \+ and if you're curious about gerry's friend, tazia, check out [root & branch](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26242255)! she's also going to play a big role in PBR. <3
> 
> comment with your favorite terrible gerry joke! and as always, you can catch me on tumblr @[gerrydelano](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/). no big sappy thank yous yet — we still have an epilogue!


	17. whistle for the wind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jon is still covered in old marks, too, like mist fogged over the ancient fingerprints on an hourglass. Faint enough now that Gerry wonders if they stand a chance at wiping them away. The way Jon is talking now, he thinks they just might.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fanart first here we have:  
> \+ [this incredible collage](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/623914400651313152/) by @red-reys! PLEASE read the explanation for each component, it's so detailed!  
> \+ [ADORABLE whisper of the heart AU screencap edits](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/625543285828698112/) by @marksollinger! yes, an AU of an AU. we have transcended.  
> \+ [jon in his saree from chapter 7](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/627831543260446720/) by @neela-chaan! also contains a seriously important general meta on the portrayal of jon's indian heritage in fanworks across the board, i'll talk about this more in the end notes.  
> \+ [reunion gerry bust](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/623926433821163520/) by @littlerobinsart!  
> \+ [reunion gerry](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/623915765123448832) by @treeroutes!  
> \+ [here he is again](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/624558921570500608/) by @kayleerowena!  
> \+ [and again](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/624749099831410688/) by @kimrylthelordofbones! gosh! he's soft!  
> \+ [another i wasn't expecting](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/628003945443475456) by @wishingwellsandmagicspells!  
> \+ [jon and gerry on the couch](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/627382573509885952/) by @hatnhousejacket (this is my desktop wallpaper okay)  
> \+ [and another couch scene](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/628117043912343552/) by @grandmas-haunted!  
> \+ EDIT 10/8/2020: [this lovely reunion gerry](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/631462341938118657/) by @raven-dreaming!  
> \+ [and this INCREDIBLE gerry & ophelia](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/631462212193730560/) by @chromaticmelody!  
> ( **there is an image at the bottom of this chapter!** mobile users, open it in a new tab if it's squished on your screen!)
> 
> a handful of songs for suggested listening:  
> \+ [swimming tide - storia](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m72m1dxvFak)  
> \+ [watch the stone - storia](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwCzqfGOcHg)  
> \+ [into the west - annie lennox](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoVaK2NXmJA)  
> \+ and here's a very small [miriam playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3y7LALry0choG3FSufbEgr?si=75Zpt9RYQbK7GnrMMtNLnw) that is still under construction, but contains appropriate vibes!
> 
> here we go!

_whistle for the wind - hope for the impossible_

───── ☆ ─────

Tazia,

Do you still go by that nickname? Your parents called you ‘Ana’ when they yelled for you across the yard. I don’t know how much you’ve become what they wanted you to be, or if you’ve finally left the estate. Something tells me you’re exactly where I left you, and I might be a little more of an optimist now but I do know better than to hope you’ll write back to tell me I’m wrong. So, instead, I’m just hoping there’s enough of you left that we’re still friends.

I hung up pretty fast the last time I called you. Not sure if that was justified or not, or if sending you this letter is going to be worth it when I could just pick up the phone again. I think I wanted to just get as much of it out at once as I could, so I don’t panic again and give up on trying to fill you in. I had to type it up, too, because for a tattoo artist, my penmanship really sucks and for some reason I never had your email.

But I do miss the sound of your voice. My Italian is probably pretty rusty now, but I get the feeling that I’d remember more than I think I do the second you start talking back to me. If we fill each other in on anything real, I don’t want it to be on paper.

I don’t want to write about my mother when I actually have good things to tell you now. Sort of like the last time I was at your place, and I actually had stories about boys for you and you didn’t laugh at me or judge me or get shifty. Just told me you wished someone would knock on your window and make you feel like a princess. I felt bad for being the only one of us to even get a week or so out of my shitty tower. For not being able to just slap on some tinfoil and be the prince we both knew I wasn’t, just so you could feel rescued for a minute, too.

I still think about sitting by your garden with that lesbian zine I found in the library in Mantua. I didn’t know enough Italian to read it by myself, so you read all the poetry aloud and translated and the sun was shining and I remember how happy you looked. Like you were reading something written just for you, by somebody that loved you and wanted you to know that you could love them back. I know back then I just wanted to read every piece of gay literature I could get my hands on, and it didn’t occur to me that you hadn’t gotten the chance to read _any_ yet. Did you ever find words for how that poetry made you feel? If I called you, would you tell me?

You can call me now, if you’re not too pissed about the radio silence. It’s safe. My mum’s finally gone, and I think I’m really okay.

I don’t know how you remember me or picture me in your head, if you think about me at all to even have an image, but I know enough about myself now to confidently say I’ve changed. I wonder if you’d be proud of me, or just surprised I’m even still alive. I definitely didn’t expect to make it this far. I thought if I was ever going to, it’d be because you and I made good on our pact to meet each other in Paris. I know you gave up on that just as fast as I did, but I’m still sorry.

I didn’t totally give up on you, though. I think I just really wanted to tell you that I kept that flower you cast in resin for me. It’s on the zipper of my bag with a bunch of other things I’ve collected since then. To ground me. Remind me people are good, even in our world. Long story short, it’s saved my life a few times. I feel like you should know it started with you. I’m always worried I’m going to break it someday, but it hasn’t failed me yet.

I wrote my new number on the back, since I actually have one of those now and I don’t live in the bookshop. Give me a call, or don’t. Either way, take care of yourself.

Tanti abbracci,  


— Gerry

  
  


“Is it okay?”

“Hm?” Jon sniffs, lifting his head to squint through the sunlight as he wipes his eye with the pads of his fingertips. “Oh, yes, it— Well, actually, I think there are a few changes you could make.”

“Yeah?” Gerry leans over to look down at the paper, frowning to find the mistakes. “Did I go on too long?”

“No, it isn’t that, I don’t think. It’s more, um… _‘Let me know, or don’t.’_ And— And the bit about how much of her might be left, I think you should take those out entirely.”

Gerry’s frown deepens. “Thought I was being fairly tame, honestly.”

“Maybe you were, between two people who grew up the way you did.” Jon taps at the words, angling the paper towards him. “But the stated disbelief that she could ever want to hear from you is… well, I don’t want to say it comes off as a _guilt trip,_ but it is rather self-deprecating.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Gerry confirms.

Jon tips his head onto his shoulder. “I know. That’s why you should get rid of it, so she doesn’t misread your intentions. In case there isn’t as much of her left as you’re hoping.”

Gerry shifts on the bench they’ve claimed, the warm granite a balm to sore legs. They’d walked a while to get here. It’s late October, early afternoon. Birds are singing from somewhere unseen.

“I don’t have a pen,” he says on the tail ends of a yawn. “I cleaned out her saddle bags the other day, think I left them on the table.”

They both tilt their heads at Ophelia where she’s lying on the grass a few paces ahead of them. She stares back with big, amber eyes, her chin still lowered down onto her paws. Her tail flicks.

“That’s alright,” Jon says. “We can look at it again when we get back and I can drop it off in a post box for you on my way home.”

It’s such a simple favour. It really is that easy now, sometimes. Gerry readjusts his arm around Jon’s shoulders, rests his chin on the crown of his head when Jon tucks himself underneath it.

He’s almost worried that it’ll do more harm than good to send Tazia this letter, after all this time. Will it matter, or shatter something? Has Tazia put him in a box, too? Was it harder for her because her parents might still be alive, might still be making her tend Terenghi Gardens under the weight of their supervision? Did she ever have anyone else aside from him to walk in the sunlight with?

They’d met when they were both seven, too small to tarry with their parents’ trade. As they grew older, they’d learned how to make jokes about being banished to the evil kiddie table, but before then, they hardly said a word. Neither of them had ever had anything close to a playmate before, much less a real friend, and there was no shared language between them yet. Gerry doesn’t remember which of them bridged that gap first. He doesn’t think it was him, but he remembers how she’d beamed the first time he said arrivederci before his mum tugged him out the front doors.

Walking through that garden was the only thing they could do together. It was all Tazia ever _wanted_ to do; it was her Pinhole Books. His mum had already told him what lay beneath the soil there. When Tazia pointed to each sprawling bushel and recited their names with fervent respect, Gerry already knew she wasn’t teaching him their species. She was introducing him to her family, and he tried not to be so afraid when the vines rooted above her nonna slithered out to greet him. Tazia told him to stand still and let it twine up his leg, giggled when it flicked his hair from his eyes like an old woman might if she still had her hands. He’d listened to her, but he couldn’t help questioning her faith in Dirt.

Has Tazia felt an uncorrupted love yet? There’s nothing Gerry wants more for her, aside maybe her freedom.

He isn’t the one who needs to want it for her. Tazia has to want it for herself. Gerry is more afraid of her responding just to tell him that she doesn’t than he is of never hearing her voice again.

But he and Jon made a deal. If they’re both doing these things, it’s easier.

“Have you called Mickey yet?”

Jon twitches a little at the broken silence, his hands freezing midway through folding the letter back into sections. “Oh. Yes, um. She does want to get lunch. Monday.”

“That’s good. Why do you sound so nervous, though?”

“Because I’m nervous? I haven’t seen her since _Chess.”_ Jon crosses his arms, the roll of his eyes almost audible. “I can’t believe I let you bully me into making a Facebook just for this.”

“I did not _bully you,”_ Gerry defends. “I amiably suggested that you make a Facebook.”

“Loudly and at length.”

_“Slander.”_

Jon laughs. He twists his dupatta in his fingers gently, like he’s afraid to rip the navy embroidery right out from the fine, green chiffon.

Gerry hums. “Do you feel alright going alone?”

A scoff, and a mumble. “Not really, no.”

“I could go with you.”

Jon pauses to consider. “She’s engaged. Maybe she could bring her fiancée.”

“That sounds nice. The more the merrier, right?”

“I just feel guilty.” Jon plucks at the swirling stitching on his kameez. Gerry rubs his knee.

“I know,” he says. “But we made a deal. You’d call her if I sent that letter, and vice versa.”

Jon sighs, and echoes, “I know, I know. It’s my own damn fault things ended the way they did. I pushed her away. At least you had somewhat of an excuse.”

“Yeah, mum showing up early to drag me home from cursed summer camp is that much more dire than you entering a major depression that ate years off your life.”

“It… sort of is?”

“Neither of us could do much about it at the time.” Gerry takes the folded letter from Jon’s hands, waves Ophelia over to fold it back into her saddlebag. “Maybe you could have done things differently in theory. Doesn’t mean you had the tools.”

“Or the guts,” Jon grouses. “Or the spine. Or the heart.”

“Now who’s being defeatist?” Gerry smiles at him, sitting up when his hands are free. Ophelia lies down in the grass again, settling in a patch of sunlight. “No shame in it. She wants to see you again. Maybe she’ll come to the beach next week, if you hit it off all over again.”

Jon makes a little noise in his mouth, fingertips fussing with the close-cropped hair along his jaw. “Maybe. Maybe.”

“Why not?” Gerry asks. “Isn’t it better to have as many people for this as possible?”

“I mean… it’s nice in theory, but I want to focus on getting through lunch first. I just hope we don’t… have any adverse effect or anything." Jon frowns into the distance, a ways away from their bench. “I still don’t know how I feel about letting it come here.”

The grass between them and the wide, companion headstone they had come here to see is almost completely flooded with a wheelbarrow’s worth of pink carnations. There is a dizzying air to the way some of them sway, like the ripple of scalding heat on tarmac. Loose petals catch in the grass, tumbling along towards their bench on a breeze. Ophelia sneezes when one brushes past her nose.

Gerry had wanted to be touched by the gesture at first, if only for knowing where they’d come from, but he knows he’s the odd one out. Michael shouldn’t make sense to most people.

Jon had let out a rattled gasp when they saw them, rushing ahead to rake them off of the granite and out of the broad space in front of it, struggling to bend. Gerry hurried to catch up and help him sweep them into the walkway area, went back to pick individual petals from the grass to free the Hebrew inscriptions at the bottom. They were careful not to disturb the smaller stones laid upon it, all still there underneath the flowers. Unswirling, no fractals in the grains.

Gerry let Jon rearrange some of them on his own; he remembers what they looked like last time they were here, and needed them to be the same before they could each place their new ones on all five of the graves in the plot. Only then could Jon say his prayers, and they could sit to rest their legs.

“I’m sorry it did that,” Gerry says. “I’m pretty sure it was Catholic before it became.”

“Well, it’s not necessarily that flowers are outright _disrespectful.”_ Jon sighs, almost forcibly agitated. “It’s just… very goyische, yes.”

Before Jon explained it, Gerry never quite imagined stones as the right thing to place on a grave. Before he met Miriam — _really_ met her, the second time — they just represented drowning. The wrong kind of weighted down. He’d known anchors before drifting back to her, but his body never let him forget dreadstone heavy until she tried to lift him out of the water.

She weathered the world like a pillar. It isn’t for her, to stay adrift.

“I’ll talk to it,” Gerry says. “I… think it probably did this for me, which _you and I_ know isn’t how this goes, but it doesn’t really _get_ that sort of thing anymore.”

“I just…” A click echoes off the roof of Jon’s mouth. “I keep wanting to ask how it even _got in here,_ but— I know you’ll say that holy ground doesn’t hold much ground. In our world.”

Gerry shakes his head. “That’s not what I’d say if you asked.”

Jon lifts his eyes a little to look at him. “Then what?”

“I’d say that you’re allowed to not want it to come so near to her.” Gerry looks again at the blurry carnations, wishes he’d brought some sort of bag to scoop them all up himself. “Those flowers aren’t right. You’re allowed to not want that sort of energy around your family.”

“I feel like it’s…” Jon stares at them, too, brow low. “I get this _image,_ Gerry, I-I’m looking at them, and they’re… melting down, soaking into the grass, the soil, back into the plot itself, and under. Doing something _wrong_ to it, I-I…”

A sudden laugh, like a lightbulb cracking with a surge of power. Jon bites down on the numb side of his lip, suppressing the smile poorly.

“I feel like it’ll… give her bad dreams. _All_ of them, by extension, and I know it’s… I know it’s silly, that’s— I _know,_ but it still makes me worry for them.”

Gerry’s chest aches. He brings a hand up to the side of Jon’s head, sweeping his fingertips across his temple, through the wisping waves that have fallen out of his braid. Jon leans into the motion, lowers his head back down onto Gerry’s shoulder.

There’s really only one thing that Gerry can offer to that feeling. There’s nothing illogical about it; there’s no more evidence that they _won’t_ poison the ground than there is that they will. He can’t prove anything, but he can speculate.

“For all the wrong she did, I like to think Gertrude was right about one thing.”

“What’s that?”

Gerry rolls his thumb along the bone of Jon’s shoulder. “That after death, they can’t touch you. No matter what it is you believed in life, you’re at least out of reach. Even if she could somehow know those things are there, I think she’s beyond whatever they’re capable of.”

Jon stays quiet for a moment. Gerry watches him twist the black ring around his right middle finger, in small bursts of _one-two-three_ between pauses. He rocks a little as he goes, counting. Gerry doesn’t interrupt.

“It’s dangerous,” Jon says after nine sets, resigned. Frustrated at his ritual for failing to provide him with stronger contention. “Michael is.”

“So are we,” Gerry reminds him. “But we love her, and we’re here to pay our respects.”

Jon’s head rests heavy on Gerry’s collarbone. “Michael doesn’t love my grandmother.”

“It respects me enough to know that I do. Sometimes that’s the most you can ask for.”

“Mm.”

Gerry understands. He knows Jon understands what he’s saying, too, as much as he can. That doesn’t mean the conversation is over. A lot of the time, Jon just needs to have the debate. Gerry speaks against the worrylines set in Jon’s forehead.

“Heard enough about shades of grey and silver linings by now?”

Jon rests a hand on Gerry’s collarbone. “Tell me again.”

Gerry plays with the end of Jon’s braid, Jon’s fingers wiggling past the plunging neckline of his grey sweater to pluck idly at the strap of his bralette. When Gerry glances again at the ring of flowers, the swirling energy still coming off of them almost makes the bothered elastic sound like cello strings. He looks up instead, at the sky.

“You can’t separate every little thing into good and evil any easier than you could siphon a cloud into a box and keep it there. You can identify clouds by their shape, their colour, but when it comes down to it, you still can’t quantify or control them. You’ll never see the same one twice. You wouldn’t call a raincloud evil because it’s overwhelmed. We need it to rain.”

“But when it’s storming violently and _flooding_ everything, causing damage to the terrain, and putting people out of their homes—”

“It’s still just raining.” Gerry shrugs. “What goes up must come down.”

Jon huffs. “Well, that doesn’t make the recovery period any less gruelling.”

“No. But you’re going to blame the clouds for that?”

The sky is mostly clear today, blue as anything. One or two clouds that Gerry can see when he looks up, bright white and wisping and traveling fast. 

Jon grumbles to himself, shifts on the bench to take pressure off his hip. Gerry helps him readjust his legs by hand, twisting so that Jon’s knees bend neatly over his own thigh. He traces the pads of his fingertips over the seam of his churidar; lime green like the dupatta wrapped around his back, bright against a navy kameez. The contrast in his colours today is beautiful. Like some tropical bird, feathers darkened with river water as it tries to stay cool in the sun. 

Gerry knows by now that Jon borrowed birds first from his bebe, sharing a headstone over there with his abba, both buried beside the grandfather he’d never met, who shares a place with his dadima, who mourned all of them all his life. Gerry knows better than to tell Jon that _he_ looks beautiful, and to instead admire his courage with quiet acknowledgment, a soft touch here and there. It wasn’t all that hard to figure out what he needs. It isn’t all that hard to give it to him.

Jon’s lack of response is enough of one. Gerry carries on.

“So, to grossly simplify it, the Spiral is pretty damn terrible. But I wouldn’t know _any_ of my dad’s family if not for Michael just… giving me a door, because it wanted to. I never would have even thought to look in France, much less somewhere like Coaraze.”

When he’d stepped out of the hall and into the sunlight, he’d almost thought that the hallucination just — hadn’t stopped yet. He remembers the immediate scent of flowers from high balconies and narrow, serpentine streets slithering into age-cracked, vaulted passageways. He remembers remembering going there with his mum even further back in time, with no knowledge of his father’s sister living up on a hill to the southeast. They hadn’t been there to sightsee, or connect. His mum might not have even known that Amelia had moved there already in the time that she had come to consider her brother dead, and not just missing.

“Michael knew your father,” Jon recites. He’s heard the story. “Before it was brutally assimilated into a spectral hallway.”

Gerry flicks the edge of his thumbnail under the index. “Part of it remembers, and sort of… recognizes me as a part of that memory, I guess.”

“Isn’t being able to _remember_ being human once just… another level of torment?”

“You’d rather forget entirely?”

Jon bristles. “No. No, I wouldn’t.”

Gerry can’t say he disagrees. He’s just as tired of forgetting major chunks of his life as he knows Jon is. It doesn’t feel good to forget who he is. To not know who he’s been.

“It isn’t _good_ that Michael is what it isn’t. It just is. If there’s real evil in there, there’s other things, too. Regular people are like that, too.”

“Michael is an individual… _creature,”_ Jon says. “For the sake of this discussion, if by no other definition. I can understand, perhaps, that it might have some will of its own, but how much separation can it ever really _have_ from where it stems? Even if it… means well. I can _feel_ the headache coming off of those things.”

It’s a reasonable argument, inasmuch as this is an _argument._ Gerry likes these conversations. It never feels like a fight, or like neither of them believe each other. Even if it goes in circles, even if he’s repeated himself over the course of how many times Jon has needed to hear it, it’s nice to _talk_ about it sometimes. He still can’t at Misfit Ink. Abby and Joy aren’t ready to know what he’d put himself through to stay alive. Better they continue thinking he’s accident prone, or just woefully unlucky.

Gerry lets out a long sigh. “When it comes to me, then, what do you think of first? The Beholding, or the fact that you trust me? The fact that you know I mean well?”

“Well, you’re not an… _avatar,_ you haven’t tied yourself to it completely.”

“Michael’s not an avatar, either.”

Discomfort. “…Y-Yes, well, it’s still indivisible from the Spiral, where you—”

“I’m indivisible, too,” Gerry laughs. “I haven’t made _a_ choice, but I’ve made choices. I’ve been more deliberate about my involvement here than Michael probably ever has. So, what makes me different? Where is _your_ personal line?”

Jon waves a hand, lets it drop to his lap with a defeated smack. “I don’t know yet. Maybe I’m just making excuses because I’m also…”

“Probably,” Gerry agrees. “And that’s natural. Of course you’d want to believe the one you’re saddled with has its own sort of merit, because _you_ want to be objectively good. Everyone has a bias, even me.”

“But not just towards the Eye?” Jon asks. “You seem to have… sort of a hierarchy, sometimes.”

Gerry shrugs. “There are some that are more neutral than others. The End. Even the Vast, sometimes.” He purses his lips. “Some others I can’t forgive, but that’s me. Plenty of people would consider the Beholding to be the worst of the worst. It all depends on what someone is really afraid of, what facets of it have hurt them the most.”

“The bystander effect,” Jon ventures. “Violation of privacy.”

_“Oof,_ the bystander effect. That might be what I hate the most about it. _‘If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.’”_ Gerry scoffs. “Refusing _that_ is what’s always gotten me into so much trouble.”

“But it _can_ be refused? Even— if we’re talking full-on avatars, could I—”

There it is. Gerry drops his arm from around Jon’s back to brace a hand on the bench. Jon sits up, hesitates for a moment before he sees that Gerry is only twisting to crack his back before he lifts his arm again in request for Jon to reclaim his spot leaning against him.

“You’re not a full-on avatar yet,” he tells him. “If we play our cards right, you might not have to make that choice at all. Could rough it with me in the outskirts. That philosophy works for me in just about all aspects, right down to the gender.”

Jon snorts. “You do have a way with gender, yes.”

“So do you.” Gerry pats Jon’s leg, rubs around where he knows his muscles get tense above his knee. The lime border at the hem of his kameez is crowded with geometric stitching, silvery mirror-spots beaded into the navy above it like stars. “Are you alright sitting like this, by the way? It’s been a while.”

“Hm? Oh, yes. My back hasn’t been so keen on sitting up straight for long periods lately.” As it to emphasize the point, Jon stretches a little, eyes pinched on a wince. “Better I stay stationary until we decide to get up. I’m not crushing your leg, am I?”

Gerry laughs. “You couldn’t crush me if you tried.”

Jon flaps a hand at him in reprimand, barely catching him too low under the collarbone. It’s enough to make Gerry hiss, reaching up to cover over the tender spot. Jon gasps sharply, layering a hand over as if to help press the pain away.

“Sorry! I’m _so_ sorry, I forgot—”

Gerry grins, shaking his head. “I point out the completely inoffensive obvious, and you try to pop me like a balloon? They’re not full of _prizes,_ Jon.”

Jon covers his face, groaning in horror. Gerry takes his wrists in both hands, tugging gently and to no immediate avail.

“I’m fine, it’s not so bad.”

“I know, I know,” Jon grumbles into his palms. “But now I’ve just linked punching you in the chest back to the moral quandary surrounding selective involvement with the Dread Powers. Gender comes at a price.”

Gerry laughs again, dropping his forehead against the back of Jon’s fingers. “I mean… you’re not _wrong?_ That’s exactly what it’s like. To get what you really want or need, sometimes it comes with setbacks. Some of those setbacks are temporary, some are completely inescapable. But you can live with them.”

Jon lets Gerry pull his hands down. He’s frowning, so Gerry smiles at him, nudges the side of his chin with a curled finger. Takes a moment to just touch his short beard, marveling at the bejeweled pin in his hair. Does Jon know how brave he is? How brave he’s always been?

“And you did not _punch me_ in the chest,” Gerry clarifies. “That was hardly a tap.”

Jon pouts, glancing sideways. “It still hurt you.”

Gerry lowers his voice to a conspiratory whisper. “You’re too hard on yourself.”

He really is. Jon looks down at the black ring on his hand again, twists it three more times, and agrees with a nod. After a silence, he circles back.

“What of this is actually worth _anything,_ though?” he asks. “You— you make it sound like you turned to the Beholding as a last resort, the… lesser of fourteen evils, to you. Is there… anything you actually… _like_ about it?”

He winces when he asks, as if he’s ashamed. Anticipating. Gerry understands.

“Yeah, sometimes,” Gerry admits. “I’ve probably always been inclined. Ran in the family, a bit.”

“I mean, i-isn’t that the issue? I mean… what you were put through, Gerry, the way you’ve described it, it seems like…” Jon’s brow furrows, his words coming stilted and decisive. “No one ever intervened. Isn’t _that_ a manifestation _of_ the Eye?”

“Got it in one.” Gerry nods. “Even then, though. It gave me more agency than I’ve ever known in the life I spent feeding it. I did feel it watching me all that time, but once I learned how to question what was happening to me, I gave it a little less fuel.”

“But don’t you have to fuel it in the opposite direction, then?”

“You know, I _think_ the random guy at the coffee shop will get over my momentarily unsettling glare a lot faster than it’s taken me to dig myself out of the grave I was born in.”

It’s nice, at least, that Jon must feel a little less guilty for laughing at jokes like that by now. He still covers his face, drags his hand over his mouth to muffle the tail end of the sound. Gerry shifts again on the bench to alleviate his own aches, his hand settled on Jon’s legs to keep him from assuming that he should move.

“It’s got a few benign perks. I at least knew right away what village Michael dropped me off in when he beamed me to France. Knew the right door to knock on. Knew the language well enough to explain who the hell I _was_ when she opened up.”

Jon rolls his eyes. “You knew she spoke English, too.”

“I never said I didn’t make an ass of myself. I’m saying I can speak French, and I sure didn’t learn it in school.”

Jon snaps the strap against his collar again, sulking. “I don’t see how the accelerated ability to pick up on foreign languages outweighs all the _else.”_

“It doesn’t,” Gerry laughs. “Not by a long shot. But it’s not just _knowing_ them, it’s being able to _use_ them. And all the times I used that skill to translate for Gertrude or my mum never mattered half as much as getting to sit and talk to my cousin for the first time in the language _she_ grew up with.”

He squeezes Jon’s arm, jostling gently. 

“I have a _cousin,_ Jon. She’s twenty-one and she doesn’t have a single mark on her and I wouldn’t know her if not for the things I’ve learned how to make use of.” Gerry smooths the dupatta over Jon’s shoulders. “If I just gave up and refused, I’d be dead. No two ways about it.”

Jon wraps his arm around Gerry’s middle, gripping at his sweater to hold on. “It feels different for you than it does for me. You were… raised into it, you never had anything different. It feels like you had less of a choice. I— I chose to work at the Institute, I chose to—”

“Neither of us chose to be chosen. They can choose to let you go, too.”

Another wind blows. More petals have crept over to their bench than Gerry thinks is strictly natural; his mouth goes dry upon the realization that they’re purple now. Looking ahead at the grave only confirms the change in all of the flowers, still carnations but not the same carnations. Are there less now? Are there more? 

Jon hasn’t said anything about it, so it must be just for him. Some part of Gerry wishes he could telepathically tell Michael to fuck off for a minute, that he’s _trying_ to have a serious conversation here. Mostly, he’s glad that Ophelia’s been trained not to eat things off the ground while she’s on duty.

Gerry lowers his voice, indicating Miriam’s grave with a loose gesture.

“The Vast could have taken her, but it didn’t. She fended it off enough to still keep what she loved about it. To love it enough that we know to bring it here for her.”

The first time Jon brought him here, they’d agreed to bring a whole bag of stones in any shade of blue and green that Gerry could find in a craft store, to decorate his saba’s side of the headstone, too. Today’s is a rough, earthy rock placed in an open space between them, like a clipper ship on a calm sea.

“There’s beauty in it,” Gerry says. “I see it, too.”

“Isn’t that what _makes it_ terrifying?”

“Yeah, it is. But that doesn’t mean the beauty isn’t real.” He gives a half-laugh. “Though, I might be biased there, too. The Buried really has it out for me.”

Jon’s hand lifts to Gerry’s collarbone again, fingers trailing up the side of his throat. “So, you take comfort in its opposite.”

Gerry hums, tips his head to press his cheek against the top of Jon’s head. Every time he leans up and away, the sun warms Jon’s hair anew. Something something ‘distance is worth the reconnection.’

“If I forced myself to be hateful and resistant to every little thing that could be traced back to the Powers, there would be nothing left to love.”

Ophelia shifts at his feet, rolling against his leg to hang her chin over the top of his boot. Jon stares at her for a long moment. Unsubtly, he worms his arm around Gerry’s back to settle his hand above the small of it, clinging onto his sweater. Gerry fights the urge to snicker.

Gerry couldn’t tell Abby the whole story when it came time to tattoo that part of his spine, but Jon needed to know. Telling Jon that he had only been fourteen at the time was easier, somehow, than telling anyone else. Jon had already seen him suffer sooner. Gerry will gladly offer a neat anthology of his own scars if it means that Jon doesn’t have to resort to a strangers’.

Jon had needed to see the claw trenches himself, and know which Power they had come from and learn about it through them. To touch them and be convinced they were healed. They don’t look it, all wound up and red and uneven from a poor attempt at sutures in the bleeding forest, but Gerry doesn’t need to sleep with his back against the wall anymore. He doesn’t feel animal breath on his neck unless it’s Ophelia is trying to wake him up from a collapse, shimmying underneath his head to lift it off the floor. 

There is no way Gerry could ever describe the grounding relief in that feeling. It chases _away_ the fear.

So, Jon earns a kiss to the forehead. Smart connection.

“Nothing truly _belongs_ to them, they’re just… tools that get used, and maybe favoured. Fire in and of itself didn’t do anything wrong just because the Desolation uses it sometimes. It’s not even the only thing it uses.” Gerry shrugs. “And I used it plenty before it was used on me.”

Jon shifts again, barely masking a grimace. When Gerry moves to lift his legs off from over his thigh, Jon stops him again with a raised hand. “I’m _fine,_ Gerry. Just let me stretch a bit.”

“We could just move down onto the grass…?” Gerry suggests. “Lean back on the bench. Wouldn’t that help _some?”_

“We shouldn’t stay here too much longer,” Jon sighs. He cracks his back again, lifts his bad leg off of Gerry’s lap by hand to stretch it out in front of him, his foot rocking on the grass. “It’s discouraged to dwell on the dead.”

Gerry shrugs. “Eh. We’re mostly recuperating so we don’t go jelly-legged on the way out of here.”

Jon laughs as he stands up, slowly, to stretch more fully. He places a hand on Gerry’s shoulder for balance, leans into Gerry’s hand on his waist. Gerry slumps forward to rest his head against Jon’s stomach, content with the hand in his hair until Jon pushes him back by the shoulder so he can sit again.

“Sit on my lap,” he suggests, tugging at his kameez. “It’s at least softer than the granite.”

Jon barks a laugh. “Absolutely not.”

“I already told you, you can’t crush me if you tried.”

He shakes his head, sitting to face forward on the bench with a sigh. “I won’t risk it.”

“You know, Tim has a bad leg, too.”

Jon wrinkles his nose. Colour springs into his cheeks, but he doesn’t fight the implication. _“We_ have bad, bony, fragile legs. He’s—”

“Generally larger and more masculine, yes, I know.” Gerry snorts. Hands free, he leans backwards to stretch his arms behind him, too. “He’s also not here to play couch cushion.”

“Because he’s at _physical therapy.”_

“Okay. Point.”

It’s not the most egregious tease. Gerry had put two and two together when he peered over Jon’s shoulder at those text messages on the day they met, connected over-invested concern with Tim’s willingness to deliver that note for him in the first place. He could only pretend to ignore Jon’s guilt-stiff responses to mentions of him for so long before he finally gave in and asked whether he’d interrupted something. 

He’d done his best to tread carefully at Ernie’s that night. It surprised him, how easily he and Tim fell into step with each other in the following weeks. Neither of them have let Jon go into the tunnels alone since he confessed to his first few attempts.

_I thought you said you couldn’t set foot back in the Institute,_ had been the first argument.

_I’m not going inside the building,_ Gerry had countered. _Just underneath._

He thinks he’s owed that much, at least. At _least._

“It’s hard to feel alright about the ambiguity of it all when there’s still another threat right under our noses.”

No surprise that Jon’s mind would go to the same place. He announces as much with crossed arms and ankles, staring ahead at the plot of graves across the way. The carnations are still purple, and it _does_ look like there are less. Gerry won’t look a gift door in the mouth. Jon is talking about a different threat.

“Saying it like that implies we don’t know it’s there. We do.”

“We don’t know who it _is,”_ Jon argues. “Or what they’re doing down there.”

Gerry waves a hand. “Maybe it’s just a really big worm. You know, like the reverse of that one side of the plague frog debate? The one big frog that becomes more smaller frogs the more broomsticks people hit it with, except it’s all the leftover worms combining like a Megazord into an _even bigger_ and more powerful worm. Checkmate.”

“Oh, I hate that.” A weary, huffing laugh as Jon covers his face with both hands. “Really, Gerry, there was a _voice.”_

“Which does not automatically designate _human person._ But alright, say it is. Maybe it’s Jurgen Leitner himself, and that’s why Gertrude lied to me about the tunnels.”

Jon _groans._ “If he’s even still alive, why on _earth_ would he just be lurking under the Institute?”

“I dunno. But Gertrude did reckon he was alive somewhere, and I don’t think _that_ much was a lie.” Gerry sighs, dropping his head back. “You would think I’d be familiar enough with ‘lying to someone’s face by telling incredibly specific truths’ to pick up on it sooner.”

“I… think that familiarity is why it might have slipped past your radar.” Jon wrinkles his nose, a little remorseful. “Besides, it’s been at least two years since she said that. Why would he _still_ be there?”

_“That,_ I couldn’t tell you. I’d just love a guaranteed chance at introducing my fist to his face.” Gerry pouts, equal parts guilty and disappointed. “Last time was a wash.”

Jon’s laughter is clearer when he lifts his head. “Alright, I’m not arguing your intentions, but you _would_ shatter your entire arm. Leave that task to Tim and Beatrix.”

Beatrix Kiddo is Tim’s lucky aluminium baseball bat. The fact that Jon calls it by name without protest is about the funniest thing that Gerry’s heard in a long time. The fact that Tim used to play baseball is about as intriguing as it can be to someone who has never played a sport in his life, unless you count the time at summer camp when he was forced to play kickball and so rebelled by bringing a tiny stool from the trading post into the outfield to sit down.

Tim has gone with them for reinforcements every time one of them finds an opportunity to sneak in, where Martin’s usually tasked with keeping watch aboveground while they set off lurking. There have been times that Gerry knocked thrice on a narrow door between shops not unlike the one that leads to his own flat above the LookBook, only for Tim to open it up from the other side. Beatrix propped on his shoulder, torch under his elbow, effortful smile on his face as he drawls something like, _‘Why, hello! Welcome to my Dark Bachelor Pad,’_ to compensate for the fact that he can’t stand where it really leads.

Jon’s restless nature requires consistent checks, but the recovery time it requires outweighs how often he’s able to do it himself. It’s the same for Gerry, really, especially given that he can’t bring Ophelia into a place like that in good conscience. Lucky for him, he’s been in possession of a M48 Kommando Tactical Survival Hammer Walking Staff™ since he found out they existed and saw how fucking _cool_ they were. In his defense, he’s never _had_ to use it for anything other than balance, but it never fails to get a compliment out in public. Worth it. Worth it now, especially.

“Do you need me to give you my word?” Gerry sighs. “Am I not allowed _one_ swing?”

“Your word, Gerry,” Jon insists. “I’d restrain myself, too.”

“Yes, but you’re a better person than me.”

At that, Jon’s laugh goes sour. Gerry watches the humour fall from his face like dripping paint, and reaches for his hand.

“I really don’t think that could possibly be true.” Jon shakes his head. “I think you’d be perfectly justified in wailing on Jurgen Leitner, regardless.”

Gerry smiles at him. “Thanks. You, too, if you decided to.”

“Sure. That is, of course, within the confines of the irrelevant, theoretical universe where he’s even in the tunnels to begin with,” Jon reminds him, wobbling their hands over his leg. After a moment, his face falls again. “I really have no idea what we’re going to do.”

It’s not so easy as promising that they’ll figure it out. _Oh, we’ll make a plan, it’ll be alright, don’t you worry, I’ve got you._ Words like that only go so far, Gerry knows. He thinks again of Miriam and her contingency plans, her lists and her notes and her hope for the meantime, if the future was too far. He thinks for a moment about what to say that might grant Jon the same momentary peace he’d felt at her kitchen table, eating aloo parathas when his stomach could handle the sour taste of amchoor without turning over itself.

It’s hard when Jon has walked himself into a cage. The best Gerry can do is sit on the other side and pass him things to soften the isolation of captivity, but _G-d,_ he wants to break him out. He’s not going to leave. They can still touch each other through the bars.

“It’s boring to say we’ll take it day by day, but I think that’s what it’ll have to be.” Gerry brushes a thumb across his knuckles, avoids the black ring; that’s for Jon to twist and fidget with, not him. “I think we caught onto something last time, Tim and me. We’ll go back down there after Diwali.”

Jon drops his face back into his free hand. “G-d, that’s right. Diwali.”

They’ve been planning this celebration since the start of October, after a small but successful Rosh Hashanah. Purchased supplies, found a safe and unpatrolled place by the water to set up, invited a tonne of people (as much as constitutes a ‘tonne’ to either of them, reserved as they both are.) Gerry still won’t judge Jon for letting it slip from his mind, even if it is right around the corner. It’s overwhelming, probably, to get into the swing of celebrations that he’s put on a shelf for the past few years.

Gerry rubs a hand along the center of Jon’s back, mindful of the scars above. “Alright?”

“Yes, yes,” Jon says, and then laughs. “Just that _pit_ in my stomach again.”

“What for, this time?”

A helpless gesture. “Our ever-growing guest list, mostly. I haven’t seen _Georgie_ since I… well, since the last time I dressed like this.” He swats Gerry with the end of his dupatta, raising a brow at him. “Since around the trip to Dublin, you remember.”

Gerry winces, free hand lifting to rub the back of his neck. “See? We’re hitting so many birds with one really, really bouncy stone here. I finally get a chance to apologize for that.”

Jon grins at him — actually _grins,_ for a moment, before it fades again. “Because that’s going to be easy to explain.”

“Oh, come on,” Gerry smiles back. “Who isn’t a sucker for wild stories like that? There’ll be a proper uproar.”

“There’ll be an _uproar,_ alright.” Jon snorts. “From Leo, most likely. She griped about you for ages after the fact. You’d think you’d knocked _her_ in the mud.”

For all their joking, Gerry actually is a little embarrassed. As boggled as he’d been to realize he’d met _Jon_ more than once like that, it’s a whole different story to add even more obscure people into it. Facing a consequence for how fast he used to run for his life is a peculiar thing to cross off his bucket list. It’s not one he’s all that scared of, at least.

Georgie Barker is the entire reason that Gerry had thought of Tazia again in the first place. At the end of an episode of _What the Ghost?_ she had mentioned the poetry that one of her collaborators did on the side, leaving Gerry to run to Jon with a brilliant idea.

Jon had been horrified at the suggestion that he should email his ex-girlfriend from university — he’d made a point to have Sasha reach out to her when they needed to for a statement followup. Gerry can’t say he regrets pushing him just that little bit; it was worth it to sit through a giddy report of how well the phone call went. How Jon had evidently been mistaken about Georgie’s attitude towards their parting, how he hardly even _remembers_ what happened aside from having just convinced himself that she loathed him utterly. How he’d been so humiliated to admit it at first, but the sound of her laughter on the other end of the line put him at ease the way it did way back then.

“It was Georgie’s idea to invite your other friends,” Gerry shrugs.

“Leo and Alma,” Jon fills in. “I can’t _believe_ they have a six-year-old.”

“Time flies.”

“You can say that again.”

Gerry hesitates. He does wonder, sometimes, if he’s pushing Jon _too_ far, too fast, too soon. It hasn’t been long since they reconnected in the first place, sometimes it’s clear that both of them are still adjusting. Rationally speaking, if a particular plan is going to take a while to actually make a difference, it’s best to put it in action as soon as possible.

Besides. No one can make Jon do anything he doesn’t want to do. That much, Gerry has been certain of for a very long time.

“When we go to lunch with Mickey and her fiancée, we could ask if they want to come.”

Jon leans forward a bit, idly winding his dupatta around his hand to pull it tight. Gerry watches him unwrap it only to start again, three times before he voices his real worry.

“Are you sure that’s not too much?”

“Too much what, people who love you?

Jon’s lips press into a hard line. Gerry leans forward to kiss him.

“It’ll be great,” he promises. “We bought _so_ many diyas. The more people helping to arrange them, the less likely I am to fill up the beach with fractals.”

That’s always a real risk, if he focuses too hard. Sort of funny, that.

Jon sighs. “We really did order so many.” He elbows Gerry lightly. “You didn’t have to buy them all yourself.”

“Eh.” Gerry waves a hand. “Better they ship to Misfit Ink so Abby and Joy can lug the boxes downstairs.”

“It’s not a holiday you’d be celebrating if not for me,” Jon defends. “I should at least pay for them.”

_“Au contraire.”_ Gerry wags a finger at him. “It’s not a holiday I’d be celebrating if not for you, so I should contribute in whatever practical way I can.”

Really, he’d feel terrible if he didn’t. Buying the supplies, at least, is something he can do to make it easier on Jon. To be a part of it, without risking making some sort of mess of it. Now, he just hopes someone stops him if he starts drawing headache lines in the sand between the little oil lamps when he should be drawing many-petaled flowers instead. 

Not that flowers aren’t fractals, too. Just one of those things. One of those things. One of those things.

“I just wish…” Jon sighs again. “It would be nice to celebrate this with family.”

Gerry follows his eyes back to Miriam’s grave. Does he really not see the way the flowers have changed? Which one of them is hallucinating, between the two?

“You will be, in a sense.” He tucks his hair behind his ear, and then points a finger in Jon’s direction. “And I can promise that would be even cheesier coming from someone who actually _has_ family, so don’t start complaining now.”

Jon should really stop swatting at him in reprimand if he’s going to keep forgetting that his entire upper torso is so tender that a faint breeze could probably make it hurt. Even going for the shoulder runs the risk of tapping a place too near to his collar. Jon crumples forward in mortified apology while Gerry laughs at him, rubbing at the tattoo over his heart. It’s since distorted just a little bit with the changes to his chest, but that’s almost appropriate given the fractals in the iris. It’s largest and the most detailed tattoo he has, the first one he’d gotten. Probably the one he loves the most, given what he owes to it, and what he owes it to. It looks a little bit like it’s smiling, now.

“Did Martin say he could make it?”

Jon nods. “Yes, he’ll be coming with Tim and I to the station right after work. You’re going to be fine in a car with Joy’s taste in music for two hours?”

“I’ve survived being in a car for entire days with Gertrude,” Gerry snorts. “I’ll be just fine with with the showtunes.”

“Forgive me if I’m wrong, but they strike me as being two entirely different energies.”

Gerry considers, visibly. “Mm. No, Gertrude loved _Spring Awakening._ Favourite musical of all time. Really, she brought her bootleg on every flight.”

“One of these days, Gerry. _One_ of these days.”

Gerry grins at him, watching him snicker. “What about Sasha?”

Jon’s face falls. “I did invite her, but, um…” He gestures vaguely. “I don’t know, she was sort of weird about it.”

Gerry’s face flattens, too. “That so.”

It’s rhetorical. Jon shifts, uncomfortable, and tries to answer anyway.

“Well, you know, she’s never been very sociable.” He smiles again, for a split second, before it fades around a bout of weak laughter. “A-Almost worse than me, really, it’s never been easy to get her… out— out of the office, you know, for drinks and such.”

Gerry catches a glint of smoke in Jon’s eyes, fixed on the grass ahead of him. He would call it a trick of the light if Jon’s head weren’t down. If his brow weren’t so low with thought, bothered by the uncertainty in his own voice before he shakes it off.

Jon clears his throat, rubs under his nose. Gerry stares at his profile.

He hasn’t met Sasha. Not personally, at least, and the doom and gloom part of him has been telling him for a while now that he never will. He hasn’t found the precise way to tell Jon what he worried for when she never showed up to Ernie’s that first night, after she texted Tim back to tell him that she was ‘having trouble finding it.’

It might be one thing, if she wasn’t all that sociable. It feels like another, with the way Jon’s face changes every time he talks about why she’s blown him off. With how that ward is specifically intended to keep danger blind.

Not that he’s got grounds to suddenly spout off much in the way of specifics. Maybe he’s just had his head buried in the Circus for too long, keeping curious tabs even as he spends more of his working energy at the tattoo shop. Abby’s come across his laptop left open on too many tabs before, articles and digital libraries and, on occasion, YouTube videos that could not have possibly been staged. He can tell sometimes, the way the recording distorts.

It was always easiest to simplify it with a joke about how London must be built over a Hellmouth or something, but the end of the world still weighed on him.

Sometimes Gerry just thinks his real superpower is gut feelings. The problem comes with deciding when he needs to voice them, if ever. 

In this case, now is not the time. Jon is looking ahead at his family’s plot again, worrying his lip between his teeth and bouncing a loose fist on a jittering knee. Gerry will let him change the subject. He has too much on his plate right now to dally with half-baked theories about a woman that Gerry doesn’t even know, regardless of whether anyone else does.

“One rejection out of seven isn’t so bad,” Jon says. “And then there’s Mickey, maybe.”

“And her fiancée,” Gerry adds. “And Leo and Alma’s son.”

“I think his name is Santiago. Georgie called him Santi over the phone.” Jon sighs. “I hope he can be trusted around all the fire.”

Gerry waves a hand. “He’ll be fine. All sorts of adults to keep an eye out. I doubt his mums will let him anywhere too dangerous.”

Jon gives a short laugh, almost bitter, and hums. Gerry slides an arm around his back, sways with him as he tips his head to seek his eyes. Jon rolls his when they catch each other, his fingertips gently nudging at Gerry’s face to turn him away.

“You _stole_ that from _me,”_ he accuses. “Don’t think I haven’t caught onto that. It’s terrible, and I’m glad I grew out of it.”

“Glad you remember,” Gerry smiles. “I’ll use my people words, then. What are you thinking about?”

Again to the graves. “Dadima, mostly. I don’t know if she ever celebrated Diwali herself, either.”

“You didn’t with your bebe?”

Jon shakes his head. “That, I don’t remember. We didn’t talk about it, either, or do it ourselves. Likely because it’s a Hindu festival, and dadima was far more confident in her Judaism overall, given that she spent her whole life fighting to hold onto it.” 

Another sigh. He lifts his hand to point to another double headstone in the plot, only one side of it bearing inscriptions. “Most of it, she learned secondhand from Bubbe Ruth over there, and their friends at shul.” Jon drops his hand. “Everything we had was borrowed, and… very stubbornly held together.”

“Do you think that takes away from it somehow?” Gerry prompts. “That you had to piece it together yourselves?”

“No, not at all.” Jon shakes his head, and then laughs. “In fact, I think it was very Jewish of us.”

Gerry smiles with him, nodding. That sounds like something more than a few of his own friends would have said, once upon a time. It sounds like something Kira has already said. He still remembers lighting the candles that one Hanukkah he’d spent in America as much as he remembers the mark they bore, old and dull as tree bark, but still there.

Jon is still covered in old things, too, like mist fogged over the ancient fingerprints on an hourglass. Faint enough now that Gerry wonders if they stand a chance at wiping them away. The way Jon is talking now, he thinks they just might.

“It just means that she only had a few years with my bebe to get in touch with the Indian culture she’d lost out on, and after she passed, she felt too… well, lost, I suppose. To venture past what we’d established in the house. Terminology, food, you know.”

Questions, questions. Keep him going. “Were you ever upset with her for that?”

“Oh, I don’t think I knew enough as a child to be upset with her over it. By the time I could be bitter, I’d started to suspect that she was about as autistic as I am, and I think…” His free hand swims around the air in a circle, peddling his thoughts. “I think it was a lot to do with routine, for her. She’d established a comfort zone, she’d only felt safe extending it with someone bolder guiding her, and then she was alone. She didn’t want to dismantle it or fall out of order when she was now tasked with raising me into things she always felt, deep down, that she didn’t have any right to in the first place.”

Sounds familiar. Jon knows it, too. He’s had time to piece it together. His hands settle back on his lap, rubbing repetitiously along the fabric of his kameez.

“I don’t blame her,” he clarifies. “All in all, I think that my childhood was fairly rich, culturally speaking, if a little lonely around holidays.”

Key word. Instead of asking a question, Gerry makes a statement. 

“She was distant.”

Jon sighs. “I know _why_ she was.”

“And I know why my mum exsanguinated people in my living room every now and then. Doesn’t mean I’m not still pissed I had to see it.”

Gerry sits back when Jon’s hands fly up to cover his face. “How can you just _say_ things like that without flinching?”

“Because my mum exsanguinated people in m—”

“Gerry, _please,”_ Jon groans. He drops his hands to elbow Gerry’s arm, chasing after him as he leans away. “And stop— snickering—!”

Gerry, pointedly, continues to snicker. He reaches up to fight off Jon’s sharp elbows, successfully making a game out of it. Ophelia perks up by his feet, the sound of her excited breath picking up when she registers the energy.

By the end of it, Gerry has caught both of Jon’s hands in his and dropped them back to their laps. Jon is still trying to look offended, his mouth all pinched up and frowning. Gerry tips his head at him, fond.

“I’ll keep saying it,” he points out. “Not to freak you out with gory details, but just… alright, you acknowledge that what I grew up with was awful, right?”

Jon sighs. “Is it that hour already?”

“It’s always reverse psychology hour. It’s awful to you, right?”

“Reverse psychology hour? Yes, it’s dreadful.”

“Jon.”

“Fine, fine.” Jon rolls his eyes. “It’s awful to me, which means that if _you’re_ saying that something I endured was also bad, it means that it was bad by default.”

Gerry gives a sage nod. “Impeccable. Five stars.”

“But—”

“Ah!” Gerry cuts him off. “No buts. She was distant, and it hurt you. That’s just the truth.”

Jon frowns at him harder, and then at the grave. “It feels wrong to talk about it here.”

“What, like she can hear you talking smack about her from beyond the grave?”

Poetically, Jon reclaims one hand to smack his arm. Ineffectual as always, and still cute.

“Rude,” Jon admonishes, turning away from Gerry’s smile. “No, it just… I don’t know, it feels unfair. It feels _especially_ strange for you to be the one saying that, I-I mean… didn’t she change your life for the better?”

“Sometimes I credit her for saving it,” Gerry confirms. “But I know I did all the legwork in the end. You push me to accept that I’ve worked hard, that I’ve done all this good, and that’s… I don’t know, that’s just as hard for me to accept as it seems to be for you to admit you’ve had to work hard, as well. At the very least, we should both admit to our hypocrisy.”

Jon snorts. “Alright, I’ll bite on that one. Still, though. I’d think you would be the first person to tell me I should just… be grateful, and forgive her.”

Gerry takes pause. He bites his lip, and considers.

“You and I… we each knew a different woman. Remember that I only had one week with her, _after_ you’d already lived your whole life under her roof.” Gerry shrugs. “The primary reason she was so good to me is _because_ she wished she'd been more for you. She’d had time to reflect, in the time you spent away. A lot of how she handled me was projection from how much she loved you, because she felt she hadn’t expressed it the right way.”

Pursed lips, eyes ahead. “Did she really say that? Exactly that?”

“Not exactly that, but enough that I could infer.” Gerry trails a hand along Jon’s back. “We were in your bedroom, with the star projector thing on. Before she suggested we go downstairs and turn on _Hamlet,_ because she wanted to show me how talented you were.”

A sharp laugh. “You’re sure you’re trying to convince me she was distant?”

“I don’t have to convince you of anything. You already know.”

Jon crosses his arms tightly. Gerry reaches down to scratch between Ophelia’s ears, to give her some attention while Jon thinks.

There is another breeze, and Gerry can picture it swirling. The petals at his feet are pink again. Jon speaks up after a long moment, his posture slumping in defeat.

“I don’t know how to take that yet.”

Gerry sits up again, elbows on his knees. “You don’t have to know _yet.”_

Jon gives an agitated sigh. “I know, but—”

“You can say you ‘don’t have time’ until the cows come home, Jon, but the fact is these things take time to process. You don’t have to know anything _right away.”_ He glances at the plot again. Only a few flowers remain, purplepink and dwindling.

“Do you ever get tired of spouting life lessons?”

“Was I spouting? Sorry.”

“No, no. Not _spouting,_ just…” Jon sighs again. “I just don’t want you to think I see you as a… fortune cookie, or some such ethical resource.”

“…You see fortune cookies as an ethical resource?”

“Well, not a _reliable_ one.”

Gerry gives his braid a harmless tug, and grins back at the dark glare. His eyes squint almost-shut when he smiles this much, so he nearly misses it when Jon darts forward for a kiss. Jon’s expression says that it was spiteful, but there’s humour in his eyes, too. Even as they’re not quite so black as they used to be, already changing into something that Gerry recognizes. Something he’d been born with, and so set his course for him.

He doesn’t like it, witnessing the change. He wonders if Jon’s co-workers have noticed yet.

There’s nothing to be done about it. Gerry kisses him back.

“I’m happy to talk,” he assures. “Not often anyone can even listen. I don’t get to… talk about my life, really. My real life.”

Jon layers a hand over Gerry’s on his cheek. “This _is_ your real life.”

“The one before,” Gerry murmurs. “I can’t tell anyone else important. If hearing about something I’ve seen or done can help you know what to avoid, I’ll talk all day and night.”

Jon shakes his head. “I don’t want to ask for that too often.”

“Well, it’s not as if you’re just keeping me around like an anecdotal vending machine or something.” Gerry keeps a hold on Jon’s face when he dips his head and starts soundlessly wheezing. “Pop in a few pounds whenever you want some kind of mystical information. Rattle me around when I run out.”

“Stop, stop,” Jon laughs. “I know that, I know _you_ know that, I just…” 

He just. He’ll always _just,_ Gerry thinks, and that’ll have to be fine. As long as he goes through with Diwali the way he’d gone through with Rosh Hashanah, and goes to lunch with Mickey Rojas. For now, Gerry is just glad that he has permission to kiss him, and rest his head on his shoulder.

“I know,” Gerry repeats. “I know you know. Ad infinitum.”

“Ad _nauseum,”_ Jon sneers. Gerry shuts his eyes to smile, and silence takes a seat.

Their conversation seems to follow the wind. It’s appropriate, really, given everything. There’s no ocean here to speak for anyone, and maybe she’s beyond it all, but Gerry still thinks of Miriam when a particularly comforting breeze splits around him like a river. It’s not the Vast he finds soothing so much as the things that some of the people he’s loved fell in love with it for, before it hollowed them out. Before it stripped them of the things that made him love them in the first place.

Miriam never let that happen. He thinks of her when the breeze is cool, and brings relief.

It’s almost enough. Gerry is on the edge of falling asleep.

He stirs under the careful lift of Jon’s shoulder under his cheek, mumbles in protest as a warm hand comes up over the other.

“Gerry.” Jon sounds stiff. “Gerry, I think we need to leave.”

“Mm?”

“The flowers, they’re— I think there are less of them, and they’re—”

“Purple?”

The shoulder moves out from under his head. Gerry sits up, carefully rubbing at his eye. Jon looks wary.

“You knew that, and didn’t say anything?”

Gerry shrugs. “Figured it was a message to me or something. It wasn’t giving me a headache or anything, and you didn’t notice on your own, so… I don’t know, it didn’t seem important enough to interrupt what we were talking about. Fairly certain they’ll just fade away once we go, honestly.”

Jon makes a slight face, mouth twisted to the side. “I’d appreciate a heads up about that sort of thing in the future. _Before_ you start dozing off in the middle of a cemetery, preferably.”

“I’ll do my best.” Gerry yawns. “I was comfortable.”

“You’ll fall asleep anywhere,” Jon says, and Gerry laughs. He really will.

Jon pats his back, using his shoulder as leverage to stand when he gets a hold on his cane with the other hand. Gerry waits for him to find his balance before reaching for Ophelia’s leash, stumbling upright on sleepy legs. Various old man noises are exchanged before Jon reminds Gerry of what they’d left in Ophelia’s left saddle bag.

“You think we have enough?”

“You counted last time,” Gerry confirms, passing Jon his share of stones. “I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

There are twenty-six graves in the row between Jon’s family and the cemetery gate. The stones and pebbles they’d brought are small enough that Gerry didn’t feel like it would burden Ophelia to have her carry them. One by one, they place them in empty spaces on each headstone as they make their way slowly to the entrance, Jon whispering short prayers and Gerry hoping that fully reading each name before he walks away is enough to give weight to his part in the gesture. It’s about showing that someone was there. That someone saw them, and remembered to bid them farewell.

Jon carefully bends down to reach a low headstone, his bad leg hovering out behind him and relying on his cane. Quietly, Gerry holds the edge of Jon’s dupatta with his free hand to keep it from touching the ground, keeps it pinched between his fingers until they run out of stones and blessings.

It isn’t a requirement upon leaving this particular cemetery, but Jon can’t leave without washing his hands.

_It’s a little more Orthodox than we usually practiced,_ Jon had explained last time, as if Gerry could possibly tell. _But dadima always did it for some reason, and… I don’t know, it just feels better to. Especially as of late._

Gerry follows him to the small station, standing not unlike a bird fountain to the right of the entrance. He takes a deep breath, his face turned up to the bright sky. The trees are going brown and gold. It smells like change.

He glances back to the stone basin when it registers that he hasn’t heard any water running yet, and finds Jon staring at his own hands. Turning them over, thumb pressing down into the space between his middle and ring fingers.

“What is it?”

“Nothing,” Jon lies, before shaking his head. “I’m just thinking about the likelihood of being buried here myself. I never thought about it much, until recently.”

Gerry thinks it would be disrespectful, somehow, to lean his hip on the edge of the sink. He bears the weight of exhaustion on his better leg, resting his hand on the stone lip when Jon places both of his there for purchase, too.

“Now I can’t quite picture it. I can’t quite— I don’t know if I’ll be buried at _all,_ or if I even want it. I know I want to be with my family, but I don’t… I don’t know what that really _means_ anymore, I-I’m scared for the future. It’s this big, black hole, just like the past, and—”

Jon stops short in pinching the bridge of his nose, conscious of tradition. He shakes his head at the small pitcher nearest to his left before he reaches for it, finally, and fills it with water. He trails his fingertips under the fall of it before letting it wash over his hand up to the wrist.

“It’s not just like the past,” Gerry ventures. “You haven’t lived it yet. That’s not the same as forgetting.”

“It doesn’t feel so different when I can’t access any of it. I just want to _know_ if—”

Jon clutches the pitcher, and studies his hand, the wet shine of circular scars. After a moment, he empties out the last of the water over them, turning his hand over to catch it in his palm before he lets it run between his fingers. Gerry knows that this is supposed to be just as much for banishing evil as it is to celebrate life. Through the corner of his eye, he watches Jon remember that, and start on pouring water over his other hand.

“I wish I could help more,” Gerry says. “I’m no good for this sort of thing.”

Gerry can’t stand the thought of being buried _anywhere,_ much less with family. He doesn’t think his mum even bothered to erect a headstone for his father. What appearances could that have helped her to keep? It means nothing to him. It _scares_ him, and he has never been all that convinced that he would die in a way that would even allow for burial. Who would have arranged it? Who would choose where he would stay, forever, almost certainly unattended by visitors? 

He spent most of his life preparing for total disappearance. There may be people who love him enough now that he doesn’t question it much, but Gerry still hasn’t gotten to the part where he imagines his posthumous fate in any detail past the hope that it won’t hurt too badly.

It’s not the time to redirect. Jon is on his second round with the first hand by the time he speaks again. He’ll need to do it three times on each side before he feels fit to leave.

“In most cases, I would go to the mikveh to clear my head about it.” Jon swirls the water in his pitcher, empties it over his hand again. “I don’t know when I’d get the chance to go.”

“What does that mean?” Gerry asks. He’s sure he’s heard the word, but it’s been a while.

Jon starts his third pouring. “A ritual bath. It’s got to be connected to a spring, or a store of clean water — rainwater, usually. You go and you have to get ready before you go in, there can’t be anything standing between you and the water. Clean hair, clean nails. Clean skin.”

He flexes his hand when he sets the pitcher down. Gerry reaches for it next, intent on three rounds on each side, too, for symmetry. Jon rubs his fingers together, trying visibly not to flick the water off just yet.

“Immersion can mark the end of a year of bereavement, recovery from something terrible. An illness, a trauma. It could just be that you want to start over. Conversion students do it, to commemorate their new life and complete their journey, but it’s a common practice when you grow up with it and you’ve started to feel lost.”

“Is that what it means for you?” Gerry asks. “Would it help you to feel more grounded?”

Jon’s eyes linger on a spot in the stone sink, a shoulder shrugging faintly.

“…I think I just want to feel clean again,” he says. “Connected. No barrier between me and the water anymore.”

Gerry sets the pitcher down. He isn’t sure if he’s allowed to reach for Jon’s hand until they’re dry.

Even if they’re still fighting, even if there’s someone lurking in the tunnels and something off about Sasha James and maybe even a gun hidden somewhere in Elias’ office and all too many reasons to be very afraid— 

Even then, that’s _why_ Jon should still do things for himself. Things that make him feel stronger and safer and more connected to what he loves about the world. Give himself more anchors, a _reason_ to stay in touch with things. Not the way Gertrude did.

“I may like to believe that Gertrude’s theory about the untouchable dead was one of her nicer ones, but she was wrong about a _lot_ of things. I mean _really_ wrong, Jon. I think one of the worst ideas she had was that she had to be alone to be a proper Archivist. To sacrifice people and cut off attachments. Leave things behind.”

Gerry steps away from the sink, meandering backwards, one wet hand outstretched in signal for Jon to start moving.

“I think you need to do the opposite of what she did. Have _people_ with you to make the fight easier.”

Jon shakes his head. “I don’t want anyone to get hurt.”

Gerry shakes his, too. “I’m not talking about the people who will fight all the bad things with you. You’ve got those already because they signed the same contract as you, and you’ve got me. What I’m talking about right now is Diwali.”

Jon’s hands move in front of him in aborted birdwing flapping, some attempt at not flicking away the water still clinging to his fingers. His cane is hooked on his elbow, his steps slow and cautious. Gerry and Ophelia keep his pace, Ophelia’s leash gathered in her own mouth and Gerry’s gait just as unsound.

“I suppose I could talk to Georgie about it.” Jon’s lofty tone does nothing to mask his nerves. “If I get a minute alone with her at the beach. Lord only knows how _popular_ she’ll be with the more inquisitorial members of our party.”

Gerry laughs. “I’ll keep Tim busy and give you an opening.”

“Where would I be without you?”

The breeze sweeps their levity into another silence, a mutual break for effort to reach the nearest side street without either of them stumbling. Gerry tries to envision the warm light of oil lamps catching on gold embroidery as Jon starts pondering aloud whether he should wear his red shalwar kameez to the beach. When Jon’s fingertips touch the back of Gerry’s hand, they aren’t quite dry yet. Gerry links them with his own anyway.

There is a white circle skirt in his closet stamped with black flowers that stops just above his knees. The waterfront will be cold at night, he knows, but his right leg is always cold and the left can stand the sacrifice.

It might be worth it, just to stand in the water.

───── ☆ ─────

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _and there you have it!_ what a journey!
> 
> [cover art commissioned from parker @cuttlefishkitch! you can find the image ID/reblog the art on tumblr here](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/629377252326572032/)!
> 
> some more important acknowledgments because i'm an incorrigible sap:  
> \+ i owe my life to ren @[titanfalling](https://titanfalling.tumblr.com/) for beta reading and helping me to talk this out as i was writing, it would not be what it is without them!  
> \+ we owe the fact that this took the fix-it route to seb @[demasc](https://demasc.tumblr.com/) and rook @[measureyourlifeincake](https://measureyourlifeincake.tumblr.com/), actually! if they hadn't kicked me in the ass, we'd have 4 chapters and a boring, sad ending. send them fruit baskets.  
> \+ thanks to angel @[ofdreamsanddoodles](https://ofdreamsanddoodles.tumblr.com/) for letting me use his wonderful OCs to enrich gerry's life that much more, and for some sensitivity reading re: judaism!  
> \+ MAJOR thanks to blue @[neela-chan](https://neela-chaan.tumblr.com/) for reaching out to me about including more of jon's indian heritage, and helping me to reshape previous chapters with that in mind! ([here is my post containing all the edits in a concise form so you don't have to reread the entire fic](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/627925419777245184/).) again, please read/reblog their meta linked in the above notes, and boost indian voices.
> 
> and to those of you who stuck with me through the Very Long Process of getting this written: i cannot thank you enough! not going to go on too long, but the encouragement and kindness from you guys in the comments played a big role in my ability to finally complete a project for once.
> 
>  **to artists who want to draw from this chapter:**  
>  \+ [this is the shalwar kameez jon is wearing!](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/795528665352896522/795553778325258260/shalwar.jpg) and he's got a short beard, a beaded hairpin, his hair is in a braid, and he's wearing an ace ring! _i really hope that people care as much about this outfit as they did about gerry's dinosaur shirt!_ we need more indian jon art, frankly.  
> \+ [this is the bralette that gerry is wearing](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/795528665352896522/795551686432260146/gerry_epilogue_bralette.jpg), under [this sweater](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/795528665352896522/795551686465945600/gerry_epilogue_outfit.jpg). black pants, presumably.  
> \+ and just for fun, [this is the skirt that gerry is planning to wear to diwali.](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/795528665352896522/795551691268423710/gerry_skirt.png)
> 
> as always, you can reach me on tumblr @[gerrydelano](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/)! now that this is finally finished, all of my focus is going to be on writing **[pharos by right!](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1933000)** keep an eye out for updates on that if you're interested in an archivist!gerry series that might as well be a wholeass TMA rewrite! it's going to be far more intense than this, i can say that much.
> 
> also, part of why this took me 2 months had to do with IRL struggles including losing my job, so if you really like my content and want to support me, [my ko-fi is right here](https://ko-fi.com/ronniefukuda/)!
> 
> thank you all so much!
> 
> ART FOR THIS CHAPTER:  
> \+ [angel drew jon in his shalwar kameez](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/629381862505283584/)! look at him go!  
> \+ [and chiara did some beautiful paintings of one of gerry's lines about the clouds from this](https://gerrydelano.tumblr.com/post/629548431463071744/)! ahhhh!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [epochs](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24622213) by [soundthebells (kosy)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kosy/pseuds/soundthebells)




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